Help with playing hd video? (lagging)

Hey so Ive been trying to play a few videos that are 720p. I tried playing them from my hard drive and they were lagging and becoming very pixelated every few seconds along with the audio lagging. I thought maybe i had a problem with my external drive so i transfered them to my computer but had the same problem. Any advice or tips are greatly appreciated. My setup is below.

Macbook Pro 15 inch running snow leopard (10.6)
2.16 ghz
2 gb ram
any other info i need to give?

Thanks

JACK

your pc should run 720p just fine... hmmm well i had this issue when i first started playing HD content also, what codec are you using???? I downloaded the Klite codec pack off the net, its free and it fixed my problem, I just use media player classic to play back all my 720p and 1080p vids now.(MPC comes with the codec pack btw) If you dont already have this, just google Klite codec pack and it should be the first listing that pops up.

Hey so Ive been trying to play a few videos that are 720p. I tried playing them from my hard drive and they were lagging and becoming very pixelated every few seconds along with the audio lagging. I thought maybe i had a problem with my external drive so i transfered them to my computer but had the same problem. Any advice or tips are greatly appreciated. My setup is below.

Macbook Pro 15 inch running snow leopard (10.6)
2.16 ghz
2 gb ram
any other info i need to give?

Thanks

JACK

since you be running a mac, have you updated your quicktime? And as in any computer, do you have programs running in the background that would poll your processor (av programs). a 2 gig processor should run 720 content no problem.

i just tried playing a regular video tonight (non-hd) and i had the same issue. I am using VLC could this be the problem or could it be hardware issues on my computer? The only other programs a have open are itunes and firefox.

Thanks again
JACK