St-St-St-Stutter When Playing HD-DVD From VMC

[LowTech]

[color=orange]First the specs…

Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H ATX 780G NB mobo
AMD Brisbane core A64 X2 4800+ (2.5 Ghz) CPU
4 X 1GB Crucial DDR2 667 (PC2 5300)
LG GGC-H20L Combo DVD player
Onboard Radeon HD 3200 GPU w/Driver Version 8.475
Hauppauge PVR-250
Vista Home Premium
ArcSoft TotalMedia Theater

Now the problem…

Ever since HTPC v 2.0 was first born I’ve had playback issues with HD-DVDs.  I haven’t tried any BD discs yet but I have three on the way for evaluation. Anyways, I never could get the bundled version of Power DVD to work for me so I moved to TMT.  TMT works fine except that if I launch the program from VMC then CPU usage goes through the roof averaging around 65 to 70% with many peaks into the 80% range whilst when launched from the desktop CPU usage is around the mid 50s% with an occasional peak at 70%. 

The stutter is constant for any HD-DVD I launch under VMC.  A desktop launch gives me smooth playback on newer titles; e.g. Ray, U-571, You, Me and Dupree (my wife made me get that one) but when watching older titles like Sparticus or Monty Python’s Meaning of Life they might very rarely skip/freeze a frame, especially after resuming from a pause, but otherwise these titles playback smoothly as well from a desktop launch.

Under VMC memory usage runs around 1.45GB while a desktop launch runs around 1.25GB memory usage.

In contrast regular DVD playback uses less than 20% CPU and just under 1GB or memory.  The same holds true for live or recorded SD TV, which is expected.

I’ve installed the latest GPU drivers just this afternoon but got a green screen when I tried to play a HD-DVD with TMT but I didn’t try anything else since without HD-DVD playback the drivers are worthless to me.  I didn’t use Driver Cleaner before the install so I’m not sure if that has something to do with it or not, I’ll try again later. 

Another thing I tried was to set the SATA controller to AHCI.  I did this in BIOS since I didn’t know how to change this in the registry as recommended for Vista.  After I made this change I kept getting error messages that I had the wrong media in the DVD player whenever I tried to play a HD-DVD.  Standard DVDs worked fine.  So I changed that back.

So where could my problem lie?

Is the Radeon HD 3200 too weenie after all for HD discs?

Did I cheap out on RAM?  Maybe I should have gone with DDR2 1066 (for some reason I thought that DDR2 667 speed matched up with the CPU FSB better but I cannot recall where I got that notion)?

I have the latest version of TMT so I assume that’s not it.

Any ideas?
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