Just a quick update....

I've now installed an Athlon X2 4200+ and I now have silky smooth playback of live stuff with a CPU utilisation of around 40%. This is using Media Player Classic (MPC) with the Cyberlink H.264 codec with DXVA (hardware acceleration) switched on (Nvidia 6600GT AGP graphics card with the latest beta drivers).

Setting the MPC output to Overlay gives the best results - if I user VMR7 or VMR9, I see a lot of combing (jaggies) from the de-interlacing (this was when watching the BBC test transmission showing standard def stuff - which looked very good indeed - it's amazing how good standard def looks when there aren't any mpeg2 artifacts to get in the way). Then at 10pm, the real hi def stuff came on and it looked stunning.

By the way, coreavc have now released version 1.1 of their codec (it doesn't support hardware acceleration) which supports the BBC test transmissions... not much info yet on whether it is more efficient than the Cyberlink codec.

Also, Nebula electronics have released version 3.6.01 of their software which supports the BBC HD transmissions. It's software only decoding - so it's a bit choppy.

http://www.nebula-electronics.com/downloads/hd3601.asp