Very high CPU usage while playing movies!

[KnifeFed]

Hi.
I'm having quite the problem after formatting. When I play movies the player takes up a shitload of processing power. While playing an XviD or DivX3-5 movie the processing power may linger at around 40% for a while, but soon ascends and sometimes reaches as much as 98%! This, off course, causes desynch audio and choppy playback. Mpeg1 and 2 seems only sligthly less demanding. I've tried Zoom Player, Media Player Classic, Media Player 9 and WinDVD so far. I've used FFDShow 2003.05.23, 2003.11.28, 2004.01.13 and 2004.02.25 as well as using just Koepi's XviD 1.0-RC2 codec. I've tried AC3Filter 0.70b and the built in AC3 decoder in FFDShow. First I tried reinstalling DirectX 9.0b, no luck. I tried reverting to the Nvidia drivers I used prior to formatting, nothing. I also formatted again, same deal.. I then formatted a 2:nd time using a different XP-CD.. zilch!
I'm only having this problem while playing movies.. everything else is working fine.

My system:
Athlon XP 2200+
768mb RAM
Windows XP SP1 + All recent updates

Any help would be appreciated, I'm getting desperate here!

[[NEX]]

Do all movies are affected or just some??
Try to check CPU temp and try your newest Video card drivers, also check your sound card drivers, some really rare cases they are the cause, Try disabling postprocessing in the codecs. Also check try low resolutions for play back like 800x600 and so on checking how the CPU is responding

Hope it helps

[insite]

is hardware rendering enabled? if not, you're asking your pc to do all the work instead of the video card. check the settings to make sure hardware acceleration is on.

[junglemike]

For good playback make sure you have the following options enabled.
Video driver AND player (like bsplayer) should support overlay mode.
Hdd should work in Udma mode and not Pio (much less cpu power).

Once i had very slow computer and played around with it's settings to find out the possible fasterst solution. It was Celeron 266mhz (no cashe) After lots of experiments i came to the optimal settings (from the point of cpu usage)
16-bit color depth
640x480
player: Bsplayer
filter: Ffdshow
Overlay enabled.

But this should be no problem for cpu PIII-700mhz and over.