Requesting recommendations for improving quality and performance

[Tyrluk]

I have recently migrated over to KMPlayer from K-Lite Codec Pack and Media Player Classic. I've tried other all-in-one players (VLC, Zoom, etc) before but ended up favoring KMPlayer's features and interface.

I am now requesting input from the forum community on improving both quality and performance on my home theatre PC.

Here's my HTPC setup:
Athlon X2 4800+ w/2GB RAM
GeForce 7800 GTX w/component output
5.1 surround sound system, input from HTPC is SPDIF
Optoma HD80 720p native projector
100" 16:9 Da-Lite Cinema Contour fixed mount screen

Media I typically watch:
x264 video with either AC3 or AAC audio stored in Matroska containers
Occasional Xvids with AC3/MP3 audio in Matroska/AVI containers
AAC encoded audio is often 5.1 channel

As you can see I have a lot of extra horsepower that I would like to take advantage of.

I had been using CoreAVC for the efficient decoding and CoreAAC for the 5.1 channel AAC support. Two things I noticed and reasons why I have not been able to get these two working smoothly in KMPlayer:
1. CoreAVC 1.6 - I can *use* the codec in KMPlayer but the video is flipped upside down. Anyone know why this is?
2. CoreAAC 1.2 - Works fine for most 5.1 sources however I have a few that it completely drops center channel thus missing all voices. Works fine with Media Player Classic. Any way to get 5.1 channel AAC support otherwise in KMPlayer with ffdshow or another codec?

Also, is there any way to take advantage of multi core in KMPlayer with ffdshow? If I enable any post processing I have one core that jumps to 100% and the other is idle. I start seeing dropped frames and out of sync audio/video.

Any basic recommendations for a standard, default installation?

[mad]

Media I typically watch:
x264 video with either AC3 or AAC audio stored in Matroska containers
Occasional Xvids with AC3/MP3 audio in Matroska/AVI containers
AAC encoded audio is often 5.1 channel
Another anime fan, or am I wrong? :)

reasons why I have not been able to get these two working smoothly in KMPlayer:
Short samples would be good.

Also, is there any way to take advantage of multi core in KMPlayer with ffdshow?
[Only registered and activated users can see links]

Any basic recommendations for a standard, default installation?
I personally change change the video renderer to Haalis video renderer (you must install Haalis media splitter first; you find it in Postprocessing page). Then to get a better subtitle quality: F2 -> Subtitle processing -> Draw to VMR/D3D surface and I enable also the external subtitle module (in Subtitle processing -> Multi-sub/etc -> Advanced tab).

[Tyrluk]

Heheh -- Anime fan, yes, but not as much as a movie or TV show fan. Most of what I watch are HDTV recordings of television shows and movies. I also use megui to convert my own DVDs which are then stored on my HTPC for easy access.

I did resolve the CoreAVC upside down image issue. I had gone into CoreAVC and forced RGB32 as I had always done with K-Lite and MPC. For some reason, and I yet do not know, it would end up flipping the image upside down in KMPlayer. I set CoreAVC back to YV12 and the image is right side up.

Still having issues with AAC 5.1 channel though. Media is encoded with the Nero AAC encoder, multichannel, and 128kbps. When I play with KMPlayer's internal AAC decoder it down samples everything to 2 channel. I thought I would save some disk space by encoding in AAC 5.1 channel however, at this rate, it might just make more sense to leave everything as AC3. Does anyone have experience with multichannel AAC?

Thanks for the tip on queuing for multicore performance.

In regard to video renderer -- I used to use Haali's with MPC and had great success with it. With KMPlayer I was initially using VMR 9 Renderless which seemed to work fine. Using Haali's in KMPlayer causes my install to crash every time I stop playback.

Any other recommendations? Post processing, sharpen, anything to use more of the available CPU resources?