I have been reading around and it seems more and more people are running into problems with VC-1 playback in WMP. VC-1 mkvs encounter stuttering since hardware acceleration is not being utilized for VC-1, and VC-1 ts/m2ts only give you audio and no video. It really is a shame that for all the steps Microsoft took to make W7 natively support a larger number of formats there is still a gaping hole with VC-1. I have been fortunate enough to get a workaround I document working flawlessly for me, but I know others have not been as successful. Here are the few ideas I can think of to get around the VC-1 issues.
- Try the Codec workaround I documented here
- Use a 3rd party player such as MPC HC (if you use Media Browser or MyMovies you can specify a 3rd party player to be used for certain video files)
- Encode any VC-1 movie to AVC (using Ripbot264). You can adjust the settings to maintain as much of the original quality if that is a concern (I think setting CQ to 18 will get you close).
- Use a codec pack like Sharks. Shark has added a tab to his Settings Application called "SWAP" which has options to Use FFDShow for VC1 and also to disable WMF. Since I already have my systems squared away I am not going to tinker around and try another codec solution, so I cannot confirm that Sharks solution would work. If I did install a codec pack on my PC/HTPC though Sharks codec pack would be my only choice..




