What was the state of cellphone video camera quality in 2007?

Factual Questions
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Blockquote echoreply I’m sure for someone with money something better than a phone or my F10 could be found.

Very well put, which I meant to express but didn’t - he had all kinds of toys and by 2007 even I had a phone with video camera that took good quality video for short-range, up close & personal that a guy like Charlie would’ve paid even $1,000 for a top-of-the-line phone (back when that sounded ridiculous) that had better video quality, maybe filters, scrubbers, or whatever the app would be called. I can do basic video editing but dunno how to improve quality other than sharpen.

Dr.Strangelove, I’m glad you mentioned h.264 - I find .mp4s and .mkvs all the time. Some are h.264 and work fine on either VLC or Potplayer. The h.265s, will play fine on 2/3 Windows laptops - the other one, simply refuses to play video in VLC (and does play audio), but video and audio work on laptop#3 only on Movieplayer, Potplayer, or Mediaplayer Classic. I love VLC but anytime i get the highest quality encoded file, it probly won’t work for me on VLC. In general tho, sometimes the picture gets choppy, the audio lags or sounds choppy too.
Where do I look to replace something? Is it the video card? The drive is a SSD but I don’t want to replace it then still have the same problems. What affects VLC’s video playback capability and general occasional choppiness aside from the video card or hard drive? The version is up to date, all codecs installed.

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Depends on whether it’s getting hardware acceleration or not. I suspect it’s not, which means it’s depending on the CPU for decoding, and that can get pretty choppy. Try opening task manager when the video is playing–if you see one (or more) of your CPU cores pegged, then the problem is that you aren’t getting HW acceleration and your CPU can’t keep up. Also in task manager, you can click on GPU and you should see a “video decode” section. Try playing a few videos with h.264 and h.265 and see how it behaves. You might find that h.264 shows the video decoder working, while h.265 does not.

As for improving things… well, again it depends. What GPU do you have? Maybe it supports acceleration and it just isn’t being enabled in VLC for some reason. Try going to Tools->Preferences->Input/Codecs for a start and see if “Direct3D11 Video Acceleration” is selected under Hardware-accelerated decoding". I think most GPUs since about 2016 will support h.2645 decoding, but there may be exceptions.