How do I disable hardware acceleration in Vista Media Center?

[nullpointerus]

I've finally narrowed down an annoying Catalyst 7.6/7.7 Media Center playback issue to an incompatibility between my HD2900XT's hardware decoding and my PVR-150's hardware encoding. Whatever's there causes the machine to BSOD whenever I try to playback .dvr-ms files encoded by VMC using the PVR-150. Right now I'm in the midst of communicating with AMD/ATI via support ticket. However, this is just background information.

What I really want to know is how I can disable the HD2900XT's hardware decoding in Vista Media Center so that I can use Catalyst 7.7 (since it has other fixes I need) without causing BSOD's. My C2D should easily be powerful enough to do software decoding. There must be some registry switch or .ini file that can force the default (Microsoft) decoder to do software decoding during TV playback. I have tried disabling hardware acceleration in Windows Media Player--no effect.

Thanks in advance!


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Moved from OS to Home Theatre

Senior Anandtech Moderator
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[VirtualLarry]

There used to be a checkbox in the Catalyst control panel (using old-style control panel), for "WMV acceleration". I have no idea if that exists in current drivers or what it does, but you could try it.

 

[nullpointerus]

Thanks, I looked for it in the CCC, but it wasn't there. Windows Media Player has an option of the same name, but unfortunately it does not change how .dvr-ms files are played back. I'm thinking there is a registry option for the Microsoft MPEG2 video decoder...somewhere...