How to achieve perfectly smooth playback of HD content

Ok, the media center journey continues. HD content looks great on a big setup right? I love it, good to show off to the friends & neighbours ;-)  However, not all setup are right for playing back completely smooth HD content, regardless of how powerful the htpc is.

if you put a bog standard blu ray player, all will look well and life is good. However, once you get into archiving (that's another days work) & library playback of blu ray & other HD content, to the trained eye, all is not always well.

Most TV's now are 100hz + the higher the better, that's not the problem tho. Our trusty graphic cards only output at 50 or 60hz, still looks goods when played thru the HDTV... where the problem occurs is that all movies are between 23 to 24 fps, so this is the 50/24 bug you may of seen talked about on the forums, and I'm only getting my hear around it now. basically the movie playback rate of 23 to 24 fps conflicts with 50 or 60 hz on the graphic card, the result of this is ever now & again, you will see a slight stutter in the picture when watching a movie, ever so slight, but it bugs the hell out of me!

Once I started archiving the blurays this became a real issue for me because I wanted to achieve 100% perfect HD audio & video playback on the HTPC, and I was running into this bug, so my HTPC would not playback a blu ray as "good" as standard blu ray players.

To prove & get a better understanding of the issue, open your graphic card and set the refresh rate to 24hz, windows will now look & feel slow & ugly, then play back a film you know well. you will notice its "smoother"

Leaving the HTPC constantly at 24hz is a no-no because it looks shit, so I have to find a solution for this.

Fr media center, if you are planning archiving all you're movies & using mymovies.dk plugin, which most do, the ONLY solution to this issue is to use TMT5. If you use TMT5 then you Blu Rays have to be in .iso format, which brings up other issues, and there is NO FIX for any of the other .mkv content you have.

However, XBMC to the rescue.

XBMC has the option to sync the display to the refresh rate of the movie you are watching. And there is no beta releases of XBMC EDEN that can handle HD Audio codecs (some not all afaik) - so the long term is in the works...

I was a little bummed by this as I was hoping to use W7MC as my complete solution, but I was never going to scrap XBMC anyway.

So - in summary,

- if you want glitch free playback of your BluRay (.iso) use TMT5 in W7MC
- if you want glitch free playback of your BluRay & all other HD mkv's - use XBMC EDEN