A while back I wrote about jitter in Windows where the video doesn’t play smoothly.  At the time I was able to resolve the problem for at least a little while by turning off hardware acceleration. But the fix didn’t last.

So here it is a while later and I am having major problems with video in Windows 7 again. TV shows recorded in Windows media Center do play smoothly. But hardly anything else does. Netflix, either in Windows media center, or in a browser has an annoying reverb. The video will be smooth but the audio will sound like something out of a sound check.  And trying to play YouTube videos will result in just the opposite: the sound will come out pretty smoothly most of the time, but the video may have long pauses and look more like a slideshow than an actual video.

So this time I did one of things that is often recommended, I changed codecs.

I chose the codec’s by CCCP. CCCP stands for Combined Community Codec Pack. And can be located here.  (Apparently the developers have a sense of humor, and since their initials are the same as the Soviet Union’s they have adopted the red color and the Soviet flag on their website – ha ha!)

Anyway, downloading the file and installing it was as simple an installation as I’ve had in a while. I used the pack on two machines, a Vista laptop, and a HTPC Windows 7 machine.

So far, it’s working great.

Added Note: 12/7/2014:

Occasionally, I still found myself having jittery internet video even with the above changes.  I finally figured out that the jitter was caused when one or more of my media center extenders was on and pulling in signal and processing time from the HTPC.  Every time I shut off the extenders the jitter stopped on the TV I was watching.

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