| Potable_Toe said: If your bother-in-law must have dedicated graphics then suggest a cheap card along the lines of an ATI 5400/5700 or nVidia 430/450 because a properly expensive gamers card is by no means needed for media playback and resource light things such as MS word or browsing. Bear in mind also that for video playback the media player and codecs you have make a big difference. Splash Player is also a very dependable media player with almost the same functionality as KMP or MPC but has built in multi core support making it more efficient, however comparing it side by side with KMP its audio playback isn't the best but wont disappoint. This has a very nice user interface and is easy to navigate with informative statistics and useful features such as powersaving options for laptops and Hardware acceleration. For me the smoothest and most efficient set-up I have come across is plain old windows media with 'Core AVC' codecs... however Core AVC isn't free unless you sail the high seas, this has played all HD content, on my now ageing (4 years old) laptop (Toshiba Equium A300d-13X), all the previous media players have struggled with. The problem with this set-up as compared to MPC with CCCP and Core AVC is that MPC has more extensive options for things like subtitle selection and audio channel selection, in this area WMP fails considerably in comparison. Ofcourse there is everybodies fall back option VLC which uses witchcraft to play nigh-on everything in existance without the use of codecs what-so-ever but isn't the most efficient nor is it the most stable player but it can play pretty much anything you will ever come across. |
YEAH VLC! WOO!
