Some Blu-ray movies break up a lot in MPC

[HartleySan]

I'm kind of new to dealing with Blu-ray movies, so if I'm missing something crucial, please let me know.

Recently, I purchased the Star Wars series and the two newest Batman movies on Blu-ray. I used the newest version of DVDFab to rip them to my HDD, and then I proceeded to watch them from the newest version of Media Player Classic.

Admittedly, I haven't watched all the movies yet, but with all the default settings in MPC, I have observed that Episode IV of Star Wars was fine, Episode V had one brief moment toward the beginning of the film where there was some slight breakup, but The Dark Knight broke up a lot.

I noticed that The Dark Knight seems to break up the most when the camera transitions, or when a lot is happening on the screen at once (probably not too surprising).

Anyway, I really am curious as to why The Dark Knight has so much breakup, while the two Star Wars movies I've watched have (almost) none.

I have a decent PC (i7-2600K, 6 GB RAM, GeForce GTX 480, etc.), which I figured would be enough for watching Blu-ray movies, but apparently something is not fine. I looked into the issue a bit, and it would seem that GPU acceleration might help the issue, but the default codec (output mode?) used for MPC in Windows 7 64-bit is EVR Custom Pres., which, according to the brief research I did, enables GPU accelerator by default.

I should note that my primary HDD with Windows 7 on it is an SSD, but because of its limited size, all the Blu-ray rips are on my secondary internal HDD. Still, that doesn't explain why the Star Wars movies are fine, but The Dark Knight breaks up a lot, especially since The Dark Knight is a longer movie and takes up less space on the disc (which seems to imply that the required transfer rate would be lower).

Anyway, sorry for the long explanation, but I'm really confused about what's going on and can't find an answer anywhere else. And since I've always had great luck with nice people on this forum, I figured I would inquire about my problem here.

What do you all think is the problem, and more importantly, how can I resolve it?

Thank you all in advance.

[mgh]

Try vlc player as well, before blaming the bluray rips.

[HartleySan]

I wasn't so much blaming the rip as I was suspicious that MPC or some aspect of it was the problem. I will check out VLC and report back. Thanks.

[HartleySan]

Okay, I tried a few new things, and here are my findings:

- I copied the entire Dark Knight rip over to my SSD drive and tried MPC, but I got the same breakup as before.
- I played the SSD copy of the rip from VLC, and it was practically unwatchable. It froze up at several points when I first started the movie, and even once it got going, it lagged a lot.

So, yeah, I basically have no clue what to do.
Does anyone have a solution?

More than anything, for those of you that can watch Blu-ray movies on your PCs without the image breaking up at all, how do you do it?
Thanks again.

[HartleySan]

I decided to try and rip the Blu-ray again with DVDFab, and I was sure to let it process the whole time without doing anything else on my PC, but still, there's lots of breakup all over the place.
Starting to run out of ideas...

[HartleySan]

To add to the list of things I've tried:

- I turned Windows Aero off, but it didn't help.

Also, I checked out the CPU and memory usage while playing The Dark Knight, and my CPU usage is at 3%-5%, and memory usage is around 1.5 GB, which is nothing. Basically, it makes no sense.

[HartleySan]

Problem solved!
I used CCCP, which seems to imply that the default version of MPC available from their home page is missing some of the codecs necessary.
I honestly don't know what codecs are included in CCCP that caused it to work, but frankly, it all works great, so no need to wonder.

For those of you not familiar with CCCP, it can be downloaded from the following home page:
http://www.cccp-project.net/

Also, CCCP includes a copy of MPC (which installs separately from any other versions of MPC on your PC), so basically, you don't even need to install MPC separately.
Also, I used the default settings for CCCP, and it's all good.
Glad I was able to resolve that issue.

[setarip_old]

@HartleySan

Hi! Glad to hear you've found one way to resolve your varying playback problem.

I'm surprised that in your posts here you've neither noted nor explored the different video and audio codecs used on the "Dark Knight" disc (VC-1 and Dolby Tru HD 5.1) versus the "Star Wars" discs (MPEG4-AVC and DTS 6.1), as the differencescertainly could be contributing factors in the problematic playback you've described.

[mark0077]

Yeah the dark knight is vc1 and breaks up on my gtx 295. It's a known issue with older hardware acceleration I think. Try disabling hardware decoding or vc1 as a test.