Lower CPU usage in WMP?

[Eaglestrike]

Just started watching a new series that I downloaded in epic blu-ray quality and such, but every couple minutes it lags for a few screens and I lose audio. Is there any option in windows media player classic to lower quality just a tad so that it won't have this issue? Or is there another media player I should use instead?

[carve]

most people use MPC (Media Player Classic) with the CCCP codec pack which is free (get it here http://www.cccp-project.net/)

then if you have a lower end PC you should get CoreAVC (http://corecodec.com/products/coreavc) which isn't free (but you can find a crack easily), it should cause less lag than the other renderers

you can also try some other players such as zoomplayer (http://www.inmatrix.com/files/zoomplayer_download.shtml not free) which for example allows you to alt tab while staying fullscreen or GOM Player (http://www.gomlab.com/eng/GMP_download.html) which I've never tried personally

edit : I misread your post actually, thought you were using WMP (not classic), but get core AVC if you want to reduce the lag

[sruon]

You can tweak ffdshow(think that's the one for blu-ray...not fucking sure) settings directly or check inside VLC media player maybe.

MPC gives me less lag on my low-end laptop for 1080p.

[Olo401]

I just picked up the new DivX Player and it's fantastic.. runs very smooth and barely uses any CPU when running (plus it looks cool with the fade w/ Win7 Aero on)

[orinthia]

I use SMPlayer on my old laptop. Just download the portable version of their website, unzip, and play. Let's the craptop play 720p fairly consistently.

On my better pc, I installed the beta version of cccp. The betas are much newer than the release posted on the front page and have far better bundled support for hardware or coreavc decoding. Though, I've found SMPlayer handles subtitles a little better than cccp on my craptop (a certain few files of mine will slow to a crawl in mpc but play perfectly under smplayer, and it's all because of the subtitles).

Can also try the newest betas of MPC on its own. And, if you use an ati card, the newest 10.4 driver version allows the newer cards to handle hardware decoding better (something nvidia has had for quite some time though).