help w/media players hogging resources

[tenkei]

about 2 months ago, my MPC started playing really choppy. audio would continue on fine, but video would skip and sometimes just freeze altogether. checked my tskmngr and it seems MPC is using ass amounts of resources (like up into the 90s) causing my comp to just lag like a beast. I deleted all my codec packs and such, hoping to help, and it worked for a while, but now its acting up again. so i switched to VLC (which i dont really like) and it works fine, but every once in a while, VLC will do the same damn thing, but its MUCH less frequent than MPC which does it on about 90% of videos. usually doesnt happen right after starting the comp, but builds up to it over time (like hours, not days). it does it on all video types, not limited to just one extension, but ive noticed that anime usually takes a while to bog the player down while live action stuff like tv shows or concerts etc will bring it down in a matter of minutes.

Never used to happen before about month and a half ago, things used to play just fine, even with all kinds of other stuff open. Haven't installed anything that i can think of that would cause this to happen, never changed any filter or codec settings in the players, etc. have newest versions of both players, and have latest video drivers.

any help?

[redwudz]

If you really have 256MB of memory, that could be one problem. Your players may trying to cache the video information and having to use the hard drive for swap memory. If so, that could slow things down.

Watch your Task Manager>Performance and also your hard drive light to see if you are using more HD access, this may be more obvious if you play from a CD or DVD. If your hard drive is fragmented or mostly full, that could also make it worse.

There are probably other possibilities, but that's all I can come up with at the moment.

And welcome to our forums.

[tenkei]

thanks for the suggestion. i thought it could be a memory issue as well, but ive always had 256 and the problem only recently started happening. defragging sounds like a good idea though.