Im a bit (unpleasantly) surprised; My media center PC blew up a while ago, killing psu, motherboard, and likely other components. Rather than buying something new, I tried salvaging an old Athlon XP 2500+ (at 2700+) with 1GB Ram, and a Geforce 6200 256 Mb, just to record TV.

Using Vista, Its not fast enough. Not nearly. It drops at least half the frames. Despite having a Hauppauge card with hardware encoding, and despite running the thing at just 640x480 (connected to old fashioned tv).

I thought with hardware encoding just about anything over 1Ghz ought to be fast enough? My previous box was an A64 3000+, onboard crap video, 512Mb. Granted, it did run XP rather than Vista, but it could record 2 shows while playing back a third rarely going over 800MHz (PowerNow).

Anyone got an idea ? I tried nVidia Pure-something decoder, doesnt change anything. Just watching live tv, CPU usage is constantly at 100% and not nearly managing decent playback. Even playing back some of the prerecorded shows that come with Vista, playback is far from smooth. What could be wrong?

Driver issue?

What process is taking CPU, driver related or application?

its a fresh install. Only installed nVidia drivers and sound card. Hauppauge was supported out of the box. Media center is the app using up all the resources.

Changing from Nvidia to ATI graphics. I have an X2 4200+, and I started on a 6150NV based board with integrated graphics. Nothing but stuttering, and I tried with all the different codecs and drivers. I then swapped the board to a 690G based one, and everything has been perfect since. Go to www.thegreenbutton.com for more information - a good Media Center Site....

Regards

Grisen

Hmmm.. you might be on to something there. My previous media center had ATI video. Surprising if that would explain the huge difference, I wouldnt have thought a discrete 6200 with 256 Mb to be worse in anything really than the crappy onboard, no RAM, IGP 320. I'll see if I can find an ATI card to test with.

As for the green button, I know the site, but I'm having trouble posting there for some odd reason.

Ok, it was the video card, thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Although i had no ATI card laying around to test with, replacing the 6200 with a 6600GT dropped CPU load from maxed out with terrible stuttering to <30% with smooth video. I had no idea a relatively modern discrete video card could be so rubbish at playing video!