My Blu-ray player plays every DVD, Blu-ray, and even every streaming Netflix movie as smooth as can be. Not so much for my Windows 7 HTPC (home theater PC). I have found several issues that affect how smoothly video and even audio play at times in various places.
The term is jitter. Jitter simply means uneven playback. And I have found a number of things that can cause this.
Hardware acceleration interferes with smooth playback. When viewing video in Adobe Flash, right click in the video window and select settings. If hardware acceleration is checked, uncheck it to turn it off in the software.
However, you may also have acceleration turned on the the BIOS as well. On my ASRock board, pressing ‘D’ on startup toggles “speed boost” which when turned on interferes with smooth video playback.
Additionally, my HTPC feeds several extenders. Sometimes just having an extender on will cause the video to be choppy on my HTPC. The only solution is to keep the extenders off when not in use.
Additionally, I am running Comskip, the commercial skipping program, with Windows Media Center. This program is wonderful when it is working right, skipping past commercials automatically, but it is very CPU intensive at times, especially when I am watching and it is processing a multi-hour show. In fact the program will become totally unresponsive sometimes under these conditions and/or choppy. I can, however, access task manager, and get to Services in the control panel. (You can also type services.msc in the textbox above Start.) I have found that stopping the ShowAnalyzerMaster Service (a component of ComSkip) will usually improve my video and give me back control of the computer.
And of course, while Windows is a wonderful multitasking environment, smooth video requires maximum attention from the computer so don’t forget to close any browser windows or other programs when in Media Center or don’t have anything “now playing” in Media Center if you want to use videos in your web browser.
As well, automatic features from updates to scans, all drain CPU power to the point of sometimes starving video playback. I have found that my little A6-5400 AMD CPU is only able to do so much. I turn off as many things that want to run in the background as I can except for virus scanning while browsing and the firewall.
And last, but not least, I have found that my OTA reception breaks up more the more there is interference from other electronic devices and electric motors in the vicinity of my antennas and tuners in the house. So I try to keep appliances and devices off for that reason as well as it is just energy saving in general.
Following these guideline I have been able to get relatively smooth videos in Media Center, and in online videos as well as the Netflix streaming service. However, that being said, both internet streaming and over the air program reception will occasionally be subpar. But for the minimal cost I am paying for internet and OTA being free that is a tradeoff that is worth it to me, at least at this time.
Happy media using.