Rough BluRay playback at times

[acole1]

Specs are X2 4200, 3GB RAM, 9500GT, Vista 32.

I usually sleep my media center PC then bring it up when I want to watch something. I haven't run all my updates yet since reformatting (SP2 is installing now), and when I first bootup and start a BR movie, it chops constantly in quick scenes.

I look at the CPU and it is usually about 100% with ~40% the Power DVD 8 program, another 30-50% the audio.

This means that if any other program or part of my OS wants some CPU resources, the BR playback chops. It helps to increase the priority of PDVD in the task manger, but I can't change the audio task's priority.

After ~20-30min everything calms down and there is hardly a hiccup. The CPU runs at about 70%.

Is this normal and my machine is under-spec'ed, or is there something I can do to make it run more efficiently?

 

[mmntech]

Do you have hardware acceleration turned on in Power DVD? Your GPU should be doing the decoding, not the CPU.

What are you using for the audio? Maybe a sound card would help.

 

[jtvang125]

Is it booting from a fresh start up or waking out of sleep? If it's waking out of sleep it could be Vista recaching things to memory and causing that slow down. If it's a fresh restart I'm not too sure.

 

[acole1]

@mmntech
I need to check the hardware acceleration and make sure it is on. I thought it would run that automatically. I found it odd that the CPU was working more than 10%.

The sound is on-board audio from a Realtek ALC889A chip. (GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard.)

@jtvang125
The computer is waking out of sleep.