.mkv h.264 720p playback

[karnal]

All:

I have a slight tearing issue on faster pans / large movement when displaying h.264 content. I haven't tried 1080 - don't have any source files, but I have some 720p files that consistently give me issues with pans and fast movement. My system is WinXP - Pentium dual core (not core2duo) 2.93GHz with a GeForce 8400GS 512mb pci-e. The same files loaded onto USB and run in a Sony Blu-ray player display perfectly.

I've read through a couple of posts regarding different ways to solve this. ffdshow was the original codec pack I loaded to play these; switched to coreavc and the picture looks nicer, but there is still some tearing depending on the motion in the scenes. Not sure about CPU usage when this occurs - haven't been remoted into the machine to watch that. Disabled mirror driver for VNC thinking that might be at fault too....

I've gone through so many silly iterations of trying to nail this issue down. mpeg2 content is fine (Sage recordings SD only).... I don't think this would be a resource issue at this point, even though the CPU isn't "recent" it is fast enough to do 720p in it's sleep.

Any thoughts on things I can check? In the future I plan on getting a directv package primarily for HD - but would LOVE to keep Sage around as the interface to my ripped videos.