2013-12-14, 09:30 PM
t^2 Wrote:Still... It seems odd to me that WMC 7 can make this hardware work fine, but - as of yet - I've been unable to get NVPR to do the same.
Welcome to the world of VQ tuning. It can be a painful place. I've no experience with WMC but spent months tuning the heck out of an Athlon XP x2 based HTPC with nVidia GPU (originally a 6600, now a 7900GS). My best results by far were with a now old version of the nVidia PureVideo codec which was the only way I could reliably take advantage of hardware acceleration, and that only with MPEG-2 source. I found that broadcast 1080i content is the most difficult to play smoothly; I got better results with completely software decoded HD BluRay rips. My hardware is pretty low power by today's standards, and I still get occasional dropped frames with 1080i content under heavy motion. But it is perfectly watchable, so was worth the time to wring it out.
For me, WMP and GB-PVR/NPVR are both DirectShow based and performance equivalents, but Microsoft put a lot of resources into WMC and from what I understand there are codecs that only work with WMC.