I've been editing HDV in Final Cut w/ my powerbook 15inch 2g ram. But watching them in quicktime the files choke. I can't even watch apple trailers that are HD. Can I buy something for my computer so that I can play hd? What is it in a computer that dictates this? I don't understand hardware or how the computers work, just how to use them.

Hello Aric,

So you are using a PowerBook, which at this point is getting to be a bit long in the tooth. It wouldn't have hurt to include the cpu operating frequency though. Also, are you trying to play an HDV720 or 1080 file?

The primary thing that dictates whether your computer can handle it is the combination of memory and cpu speed. It is your cpu that is having to decode either 60 fps (HDV720) or 30 fps (HDV1080) and push those uncompressed frames, each of which is 1 - 2 MPixels in size, to the graphics card for display. The actual data rate from the hard drive for simply playing a clip/trailer is very low.

If it makes you feel any better, I have a 3.0 GHz Intel Pentium4 notebook with 2 GB of ram and a 120 GB hard drive running Windows XP SP2. Playing an HDV720 file is the outer limit, or even a bit beyond, of what it can handle in QuickTime when I'm looking at most of the Apple HD Trailers. An HDV1080 file has no hope.

On my desktop, a Core 2 Quad Q6600, everything so far is no problem.

Which means if your notebook can't handle it, it is probably time to start thinking about the upgrade path to a more current Core 2 Duo based machine.

Sorry for the bad news.

try vlc. It requires considerably less processing power to smoothly play the same videos quicktime chokes up on.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Also check out ATI Accelerator. It can overclock your graphics card enough to make a difference.

http://thomas.perrier.name/index.html