Strange video stuttering issue

[SINZAR]

Something happened overnight which is now affecting video playback for some files via XBMC and Windows Media Player using Windows 7 x64. A file that played fine yesterday now stutters throughout. I've looked through event viewer as well as add/remove programs, I don't see any changes that would account for this. This is on my media center PC which I've tried to keep as simple as possible which means I didn't install additional codecs like divx or xvid.


I've narrowed it down to .avi files with an audio bitrate of 192kbps and higher as being affected.


Does anybody have any ideas on how to troubleshoot this further or ideas on a possible cause?

[davexnet]

You could start by checking the device manager for any processes eating up the CPU.
Could even be virus/malware.

If nothing comes to light, you could always consider System Restore.

[SINZAR]

Thanks for the tips. Ran a malware check but nothing serious found, nothing unusual happening in the device/task manager either. Unfortunately for me system restore made a new restore point last night so that prevents me from rolling back on whatever happened.

I'm preping the system to restore back to factory defaults but I'd still like to figure out what happened here. I'm thinking it may be an audio codec issue but what puzzles me is that XBMC and VLC each use their own built in codecs and VLC is unaffected. Only XBMC and Windows Media player are stuttering.


Any other ideas before I end up resetting the PC?

[davexnet]

Yeah, you caught my typo, I meant the Task Manager.

I don't understand why you can't choose an older restore point.
On my XP and Windows 7 PC's, I can typically go back at least a few days, the system storing perhaps 3 or 4 restore points.

You could try the SFC /SCANNOW command to see if any system files got damaged. It needs to be run from an
elevated CMD prompt