Poor HD show playback in 1.08

[wtg]

If you've not tried it already, you might give the NVidia Pure Video decoder a shot. They have a 30-day trial you can download. I've found it offers the best performance with my ATI X1600 Pro - significantly better than the ATI decoder.

I'm running with an AMD 2500, and with VMR9 FSE mode averaging about 25% with 720p and 40% cpu with 1080i. That's much higher CPU usage than I was getting in Overlay mode, but still decent. If I use ATI's decoder playback is choppy and unbearable.

[allsighs]

thats pretty much exclusively what i have used for a couple years now after doing my "decoder shootout" on my first HTPC build. It has worked perfectly for me. I downloaded and attempted several other decoders just to give a shot - Cyberlnk, Intervideo (Hauppage), GPL, Dscaler, but all had same problem.

Again, this is only with HD material. SD material plays fine and looks fine. Ive tried running various audio decoders other than the Nvidia one and attemped several listed audio renderers (though all are just the same onboard audio). No good. The fact that everything plays fine in WMP confirms it has to be some quirk either in the new front end or new relationship issues with the front end/decoders/drivers. I have plenty of horsepower i would think for HD here. I cant imagine the new front end is using the resources to steal that much away from HD playback...

I'll most likely throw 1.08 on my test machine and use that to experiment from here. Ive only had about 2 months of HD goodness from my HDHomerun so i need to get that back up asap before the wife turns on me