[DavidGGG]

Pentium G6950 (of the i3 family really, the smaller cousin of i3-540) has bad video problems with DXVA2 (often fine but just as often extreme stuttering, pixelation, and strange colors). MKV/x.264+AC3 file downloaded from somewhere, made by very experienced ripper.. Works nicely without DXVA2 (and also in MPC-HC with DXVA via MS-DTV codec, I wish I could use that in XBMC; the internal DXVA/h.264 codec in MPC-HC is also crap but exchangeable).

Solution is to switch off DXVA2. Since XBMC consumes 20% CPU idle and 15% when playing an SD h.264 rip, the idle consumption most often is more of a problem anyway.

I don't think the statement "Hardware-accelerated playback of H.264 material was fixed today in ffmpeg for Intel GPUs (patch originally from VLC..)" holds water. Besides, VLC never had any HW acc support, only "experimental", which I tried and that sure doesn't work. The only 3 codecs that work on i3 etc are MS-DTV, DivX and Cyberlink. Since they are proprietary I suppose the can't be included? But MS-DTV is already present on Win7 machines, couldn't you make it use this if it's already on the PC? Don't know why you necessarily must come up with your own codec when it's already preinstalled and for free on 9½ of 10 PCs.

Edit: also tried an i3-540 CPU now, same problem with DXVA2, but CPU usage is down to 5%.