Sluggish WMP playback

[frogger012]

Hello all,

I'm having trouble getting videos I encode to play back smoothly in WMP/Media Center. All videos play perfect in VLC. I use Handbrake to encode the files, and i've tried all different formats, e.g. MKV, MP4, AVI. I've gotten the best playback out of the AVI file, but the video slows down noticeably in parts with moderate action. The MKV and MP4 videos slow down considerably and fall out of sync with the audio; where the audio will play, but the video cannot keep up.

I've been encoding the videos at 62% constant quality settings, and the output files tend to be in the 1.5 GB range. I would assume my cpu is fast enough to handle any video files, but maybe they're more dependent on the gpu than I think?

Computer info:

OS: Win7 x64
CPU: Core 2 Duo T6500
RAM: 4GB
Video: ATI 4500 something or other, just a standard on board laptop graphics card.

I also have Shark007 codec pack installed.

I could just play all my files using VLC and have no problems, but I really want to archive my dvds and be able to play them back within Mediabrowser, a plugin for Windows Media Center.

Any help would be appreciated.

[MOVIEGEEK]

I also use VLC or MPCHC to watch videos, WMP is fine for WMV.

[redwudz]

Check your CPU usage during problematic and working playback in WMP and see if the numbers are high or if there's a big difference. I don't use WMP for much of anything, but it may not be using GPU hardware acceleration. VLC and MPC-HC can.

EDIT: I just tried a HD MKV file converted from BD in Media center/WMP and it plays fine on my W7 PC. It shows ffdshow and Haali Media splitter being used for playback. CPU usage about 20 - 25%, the same for Zoom Player and MPC-HC. When I disable HW acceleration in VLC, the CPU % goes up to about 35%.

I haven't tried that with my laptop, just the W7 PC in my Computer Details. You can check for GPU hardware acceleration with DXVA Checker: http://bluesky23.hp.infoseek.co.jp/en/index.html