Video playback in Win 7

[Pilgrim57]

Since upgrading from Vista Home Premium 64bit I have noticed a change when watching video. Before upgrade Nero 7 Showtime gave best results with Media Player stuttering at times, audio out of sunch with picture. Real Player sometimes good sometimes bad.
Now with Win 7 Home Premium 64bit Media Player gives best playback & Real player is worse & Showtime similar to RP.
Am I being paranoid to think MS have optimised the OS to work better with MP or has there been suble changes to the new OS that has lead to the poorer porformance of the other 2? Real Player is latest & same ver. I was using with Vista.
I should mention this is with BOINC running. If I turn it off/pause then all 3 work OK.

 

[Rainmaker]

By the sounds of it you're playing back HD files (MKV or similar)? In Windows 7 WMP 12 now has extra codecs, compared to Vista and earlier, which only run WMP11 or below. One of the new codecs/abilities of WMP12 is DXVA, basically getting your gfx card to handle video playback.

Realplayer and, by the sounds of it, Nero aren't using DXVA so with BOINC running (hogging CPU) they're struggling. I could be wrong but that'd be the most logical explanation.

 

[SiriusB]

Watching a movie? Turn off BOINC or limit its CPU usage [if you can?].

I don't really see the issue if you have already discovered turning BOINC off fixes things.

 

[Pilgrim57]

Thanks for that Rainmaker. Have Divx installed but it seems most files are Xvid encoded.
@ Sirius B Guess I'm getting used to the changes Win 7 has brought. Under Vista BOINC seemed to throttle automatically & now it doesn't Just trying to understand what's going on. I know it's a no brainer.