Making the nVidia Ion2 play 1080p smoothly

Mentioned a couple days ago that I had replaced my WDTV streamer with an Acer HTPC. Simply installing CCCP was enough to play most everything I download, but I noticed some of the better anime (almost all 1080 resolution) would play for a bit, then the sound would cut out for a couple seconds, then the sound would come back in for a while, and so on. Given that I watch my anime subtitled, this isn't as distracting as you might think. But it still implied I needed to tweak.

First, semi-obvious option was to go to the MPC-HC player that CCCP installs, and in View->Options->Player check the "Process Priority above normal" option. Since on a "lower end " machine you shouldn't be doing much besides watching the video anyway, this insures that you are getting enough clock time.

Next, less obvious option was to go into the CCCP settings. On the first screen go down to the bottom and click the "LAV Video (CCCP)" option under Alternative H.264 Decoders. This will unselect the default option, and turns on this version of the Codec which features nVidia Hardware Acceleration. IOW, you are choosing a Codec optimized for your Ion chip set and so allows the GPU to take over some of what the CPU might otherwise be tasked with.

Then on the second screen be sure to click the option to Reregister all Filters to make sure that Windows doesn't "forget" to use the LAV codec going forward.

Enjoy!