Sony laptops and DVDS

[bogart]

I have a Sony laptop with a 1920x1080 screen. The machine has 512mb of installed memory and 64mb of video memory. When playing a DVD there is the occasional stutter. I could probably get rid of it by reducing the picture size. Would increasing the machine memory help at all? or are we talking video memory here?
Thanks

[l3ni3r]

In laptops it's a bit of both, certainly increasing the RAM of installed memory will help not only for waching dvd's but the laptop overall. The system and gfx memory are shared I do believe and thats achievable in the BIOS or the software for the hardware you have. Check your BIOS for this feature.

[jimbouk]

Could it be the drive? If it spins up and down during playback then the stutter might be caused by it running out of buffer and not realising quick enough. Using something like Nero DriveSpeed might help in this case if it can slow the drive down so in constantly reads at the correct speed (it's quieter too).

[bogart]

The drive seems to be the same throughout , just the odd judder on the pic.

[Antagram]

What operating system is it using? And are you transfering the picture to a large screen? As never knew laptops came with 1920x1080 screen size.

If it's doesn't have dedicated graphics memeory that leaves 448MB for everything else, that seems low for Windows XP.

You could try different DVD viewing software that might work better. No idea which to recommend, but could start with VLC media player

[Betty_Swallocks]

I'm sure it is the memory causing the stuttering. 512Mb really isn't enough to run XP comfortably especially at the high resolution your laptop has.
I'd increase it to at least 1Gb. If the laptop can take it get more. 2Gb should give you a big increase in performance and memory has never been more affordable so there's really no reason not to.