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CoreAVC is the fastest software H.264 decoder, you might want to try that out with MPC. I haven't had any video playback issues since switching to it. Of course it's Windows only, and not free.

My problem is that my stupid Yamaha receiver has a "DTS bitstream bomb" problem... certain BluRay movies exhibit extremely loud "digital popping" noises during DTS passthrough playback, forcing me to switch to Dolby Digital. :( Hopefully Yamaha support can provide me with a firmware fix I've read about on some forums.

Try installing CoreAVC (for video) + ffdshow or ffdshow tryouts for audio. CoreAVC isn't free, but it's worth it in my experience. 720p playback is flawless even on a P4, although 1080p.. not so much. 1080p will play smoothly on my 2.4GHz C2D w/GeForce 9800GTX (I think the codec utilizes Cuda), but not my 1.83GHz C2D w/GeForce 7600GT. I believe they have a trial version on the website now. Not sure what, if any, limits the trial has, but you could check it out. I believe it's $10 to buy, so (hopefully!) not breaking the bank in any case. http://www.coreavc.com/

VLC (VideoLAN Client) media player was good up to the 0.8.6 releases and after that it took a bit of a tumble in design and lost popularity because of its tendency to crash or freeze at any minor error or corruption in the media files.

Media Player Classic Homecinema stepped in and took the reigns after that. This player includes internal decoder filters for MPEG-2 (DVD), MPEG-4 (XviD, DivX), H.264 (Blu-ray), and VC1 (Blu-ray) along with audio decoders for AC3 (Dolby Digital), DTS (Digital Theater Systems), AAC (Advanced Audio Codec), etc. It also includes native support for MKV (Matroska) and AVI (Audio Video Interleave) file formats.

The most important feature of MPC-HC is the hardware accelerated DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) decoder filters for the H.264 and VC1 Blu-ray codecs allowing this player to leverage ATI, nVidia, and Intel graphics cards to handle the work load with complex 720p and 1080p movies. The difference in CPU usage goes from 70-100% on software decoding with dropped frames to 5% on DXVA decoding and no dropped frames, of course this is relative to the CPU being used.

DXVAChecker is the best tool to use to determine if your video card and latest drivers support hardware acceleration. It will list the list of video streams that are accelerated such as MPEG2, WMV9, VC1, H264 along with DXVA1 (XP DX9) or 2 (Vista DX10) for the version along with the resolution such as 720x480, 1280x720, 1920x1080 that is supported.

FFDshow Tryouts is another codecs to look into is that is based on libavcodec and ffmpeg-mt (multi-threaded) and handles pretty much all audio and video codecs in software using CPU decoding and includes a lot of filters for audio 2.0->5.1 up-mixing, real-time AC3 encoding for surround sound, noise filtering, and video filters for noise, sharpening, and subtitle support.

CoreAVC Pro codec is the most efficient software and hardware nVidia CUDA accelerated H.264 (Blu-ray) decoding. In hardware CUDA mode it users ~15% CPU to perform decoding and in software mode it users 50-70%, relative to the CPU being used of course. This codec a bit more efficient than FFDshow in software but a lot better in CUDA mode, nVidia video card required.

Haali Media Splitter is the preferred splitter for MKV (Matroska), MP4, and AVI files. This is the recommended splitter for these file formats over the internal splitters that usually come with the players.

MPlayer Media Player is also a complete alternative that now has hardware acceleration support for nVidia video cards with the latest SVN releases.

Ditto that sentiment. I'm very sorry to tell my OSX/Linux using friends that, no, your brand new $2000 Macbook Pro cannot play this 1080P x264 file because the decoder will only use one core and it's not fast enough to keep up. Unfortunately, until the ffmpeg-mt branch becomes stable and gets merged back in (and now it will be months before that happens) you have to use Windows or wait for http://www.coreavc.com/ to be ported to your platform.

Even in the face of a preference for open source, just about everyone in the HD community will admit that you either need a really fast rig (C2D/AX2 ~2.4Ghz for 720p, ~3.0ghz for 1080p), some sort of GPU-offloading or a CoreAVC because it can do real multithreading (slice-based is fail). This is going to be very important if Linux based media-centers are going to have any punch in the living room.

It's a disappointing area for proponents of OSS, to say the least.

No you don't, try grabbing CoreCodec.

I can't say it will definitely play 1080p on a 2.7 p4, but its the fastest h.264 decoder out there :)

CoreAVC should do it if you pay for the pro one (allegedly; not noticed the trial version doing so, but perhaps it doesn't include it). You can also try MPC-HC which will try to use DXVA for H.264, though I'm yet to actually catch it doing so.

That's not entirely accurate - a lot of it depends on the codecs you use.

I have a demo I like to do where I decode and play back 1080p HD using CoreAVC, on a 1GHz laptop (downclocked - it's hard to find a PC with a native resolution of 1920x1200 and a clock speed of 1GHz). Yes, it drops some frames, but it's quite watchable.

I also do 320x[240-320] H.264 (full screen) playback on a Treo 650. It's got a 312MHz ARM processor, and 32MB of RAM (~24 available).

None of this is hardware accelerated.

BenchMarks here. This is an older benchmark; CoreAVC is better now.

Your SSL certificate checker has issues. Even when checking an SSL-enabled URL, with a valid commonName, it breaks because it's the wrong host.
Your check page
Wrong host for SSL certificate. Certificate for "services.corecodec.com", actual host "www.corecodec.com". (Peer certificate commonName does not match host, expected www.corecodec.com, got services.corecodec.com)

There's a reason we don't link to https://www.corecodec.com/ - the SSL cert is appropriate for the URLs we call it under. Disregarding that, pulling a https cert for a different host, then complaining that it's not "valid" is bad practice.

Many sites don't use SSL on their main domain - they often use secure.theirdomain.com, ssl.theirdomain.com, etc. It's still a SSL cert for the domain, what's the problem?

Also, your "address checker" needs some real work too - we get a negative rating because we don't have an address on the site. We have a "Contact Us" link on nearly every page on our sites. From the details, it looks like your address regex could some tweaking - it thinks "Windows Mobile, PocketPC" is an address, but our street address isn't.

Funny, but not quite true. Those system requirements are simply for using the codec to transcode content. If you actually want to watch a 1080i/1080p stream (as the HD-DVD/BD formats provide/will provide), you're going to need substantially more horsepower. They claim a 2.8Ghz P4 can cut it, but I'd be surprised if you can eliminate stuttering and frame drops with anything less than a dual core.

The computational requirements for decryption pale in comparison to actually decoding (decompressing) and displaying the stream.

Anyway, cutting edge hardware *is* overkill for some/many people, but that's been true ever since 16-bit systems started replacing their 8-bit counterparts. That's why bargain basement systems exist.

My current dual 1.6 GHz Opteron system can't do it in real time. Doesn't even come close.