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Archive for February, 2010

I have had issues playing back 1080p and 720p movies smoothly on my new TV. The TV is connected to an Asus Barebone which is capable of outputting 1080p on HDMI, but my preferred player has always been VLC. Sadly, I have come to realise that the since VLC uses built-in codec, it is very lacking when it comes to 1080p and 720p playback, i.e., H.264 decoding.

The issues I experienced was:

• Jittering
• Audio lag
• 720p could not be scaled to 1080p for playback
• 1080p playback in 1080p would just amount to large pixelated blocks on the screen
• and so on…

Unfortunately, this is really due to the lacking codec performance in VLC itself, but changing player and installing codec resolved 95% of my issue. The last 5% is really due to the lacking GPU power of my Asus Barebone’s ATI X1200 graphics card.

To get it working nicely, you need to:

• Install CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack).
• Replace VLC with Media Player Classic – Home Cinema, since it has the ability to use external codecs
• Buy and install CoreAVC, since CCCP only uses FFDShow for H.264 decoding, which sadly is slow compared to CoreAVC.

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