1080p playback stutters - any ideas?

[8767092]

I suspected something like that. I also wasn´t really motivated to upgrade my ram, as it´s difficult or expensive.

I heard that there is a perfectly encoded file doing the rounds, which is a snippet form the BBC Earth BluRay disks. Apparently this file is something like the benchmark for encoding. Does anyone have a link to this file? I could use it to determine whether it´s the encoding of the files or the hardware that´s the problem.

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[Cave Man]

I heard that there is a perfectly encoded file doing the rounds, which is a snippet form the BBC Earth BluRay disks. Apparently this file is something like the benchmark for encoding.

I suspect you're referring to the infamous "bird scene" from the "Pole to Pole" episode of Planet Earth. It is encoded in an unusual VC-1 scheme, probably 1080i, that causes problems. The Blu-ray rip even causes my quad-core Q6600 (3.2 gHz) to stutter. It's bit rate is not all that demanding - 20 MB/s or so. When I transcoded it to h.264 m4v, even my 2 gHz Mac Mini can play it. My view is that scene in its original VC-1 codec is really not suitable for evaluating your playback abilities.