Any clue why snapstream uses at least 50% less cpu for HD?

[fragmental]

Any time I try to watch a live hdtv broadcast or play an hdtv mpeg transport stream, all of the software, except btv will max out the cpu, or get close.

I've used watchhdtv, gb-pvr, vlc, media player classic, windows media player, and probably others that I can't think of right now. All of them seem to max out the cpu if I play a 1080i or 720p video. Snapstream never does though. I've tried all sorts of codecs and configurations. It might be the snapstream video decoder, but what makes the snapstream one better than the others(ati, cyberlink, nvidia, etc.)?

I did have some luck with nvidia purevideo but it's still typically higher than using btv and the snapstream codec, and I've also had trouble getting many video players to use the purevideo codec. Purevideo and cyberlink are the only video decoders besides snapstream's that show up in btv and they have a tendency not to look right. Wrong aspect, high cpu usage...green bars. It's kind of a crap shoot. Sometimes purevideo looks right, but cyberlink usually doesn't work with HD at all. After trying the nvida codec in btv once I had green bars in overlay for a long time, with any codec. I had to use hardware mode, which played ok except the interlacing didn't seem to work right all the time and would cause poor video playback; especially in HD. But it eventually sorted itself out.

[cdouglas]

I too have noticed that the snapstream codecs work better that all others for HDTV. I use Mediaportal for my htpc frontent and the mediaportal MPV/MPA codecs are really jerky when trying to watch tv in MP. I tell MP to use the snapstream codecs and it works great.

But I can't answer your question as to why.

-Chris

[mlomker]

Not sure. Afaik Snapstream's codec is actually from PowerDVD6 and they didn't write it themselves. I have never seen a performance difference more than 2% between codecs but I assume that's because I have a Core2Duo and the differences are more pronounced on older machines.

[fragmental]

my cyberlink codec is from powerdvd xp 4, so that might have something to do with it. I'm trying to see if upgrading to 6 or 7 makes a big difference.