Stuttering WMV Playback Issue

[TrebiusUK]

Recently any .wmv file has become completely unplayable in any other player except for Windows Media Player and mplayer. MPC and Zoom Player both exhibit what I can only call extreme stuttering, almost jerky playback with the audio breaking up. I have tried reinstalling wmp and even installing the VCM codec but no luck. I've also noticed that when playing a file and getting this problem in an affected player my cpu usage jumps to around 70%; in wmp the same file plays at about 8% useage. I can't seem to find anything about this on the net anywhere, can anyone suggest anything else I can try to sort this problem out?

Thanks.

[IvS]

In case you have ffdshow installed, go to its "video decoder configuration" and disable WMV1/7. I had a clip recently that played jerkily with it.

[zambelli]

Which renderer are you using in MPC? Do you by any chance have the DXVA WMP hotfix installed? Like IvS suggested, make sure ffdshow isn't handling any WMV decoding.

[TrebiusUK]

Thanks for the replies. I do have ffdshow installed but it's disabled for the decoding of all wmv files, and anyway the "stuttering" occurs with wmv9 files as well. I don't have the hotfix installed. I was using the overlay mixer in MPC but i've found that changing to system default fixes the issue. Strange, I'm certain wmv files used to play fine using the overlay mixer before. Well at least that solves it. Is there any downside to just using the system default renderer that you know of?

[IvS]

The overlay mixer can be unstable. Who knows, it may be related to a graphics driver issue. The system default is VMR7 which is the most stable and uses overlay rendering too so it's just fine.