Choppy Playback 1080p Movies
 

I recently picked up a 24 inch lcd, so I've been testing it out with some 1080p movies. I've mostly been downloading them from these two places:

Quicktime HD

WMW-HD Clips

The WMV-HD files run smoothly and look great, but the H.264 quicktime files chug along and play back really choppy. When I check the Task Manager, the cpu usage is 100% while playing the quicktime files but stays around 30% for the WMV-HD. Has anyone else run into this problem with H.264 quicktime files?

I'm running Windows XP with an Athlon 64 3500+, 2 GB RAM, and an eVGA 8600GT.

Quicktime uses more resources than WMP and for high def needs a ton more computing power than WMP so I'd say choppyness is to be expected unless you got a bleeding edge fast machine. Quicktime likely plays perfectly on a Mac I'm sure :)

After reading up on this, it appears that there's a conflict between the hardware-based nVidia H.264 codec and Quicktime, at least with the 88xx line. The advice I saw was to disable DirectDraw in Quicktime, or to run the app in Safe Mode.

I disabled DirectDraw but I didn't see any improvement. I've been doing some more research, and I think catback is right. I just need more computing power or maybe an upgrade to a dual core.

**UPDATE***

Well, I ended up doing a little more research and was able to solve my problem. It turns out I don't need a new CPU after all. I just needed a program that takes advantage of hardware acceleration for decoding HD content. I tried out PowerDVD, and the 1080p files run perfectly now with only 20% CPU usage because it's being decoded on the GPU.