Watching HD video
 

I downloaded 790p videos and it lacks quite a bit. So the audio and video are never in sync. My computer is quite old so I'm assuming it's because my videocard isn't HD compatible, and I'm too much of a cheap ass to afford an HDTV + HDDVD player ._.

1) There's no such thing as HD-compatible videocard. That's just another marketing buzzword. The question is if it's possible to offload computations to the GPU (and that's dependant on codec/player)
2) What media player is used to view the stream?
3) What is 'quite old', be specific. What CPU and what GPU (memory isn't that important)

I use Media Player Classic. People suggested VLC but it's the same deal.

My CPU is Pentium 4 - 3.04Ghz; Intel Integrated 128MB Video Card.

If you use VLC, what version exactly?
Also check what kind of stream this HD video is. You can do this very easily with VLC, just check the file properties. Sometimes VLC uses the Windows codecs because it thinks that the ffmpeg component (the library that handles nearly every media file format in the world) can't do the job. That's probably the case with VC-1 material, where the decoding implementation in ffmpeg is rather young.

I just downloaded the latest version, and no change. This is rather a noob question, but where would I look in the preferences to see what codecs it is using?

I've been reading about CoreAVC. Is that necessary?

CoreAVC is considered a fast decoder, but it doesn't produce reference results no it'S not really standard compliant. You should however first check which material your stream consists of.

@codec:
View|Stream and media info

Ah, I knew what was the problem. The aspect ratio was too high, I just toned it down to 221x100 or something, and it now runs smoothly.

Thanks for all the help though. Really appreciate it! =)

Aspect ratio to high? The ratio is a constant, you probably mean the zoom factor.