I have had an HTPC running Windows Vista Home Premium on it for about 8 months now and the entire time I’ve been battling the video stuttering on a somewhat streaky basis. I could watch entire football games without a whole lot of stuttering. And sometimes I couldn’t watch even 5 minutes out of an entire football game because the stuttering was so bad.

My setup is the following:

• 2GHz AMD Dual-Core AM2 CPU
• 120GB 7200 RPM 8MB Buffer Hard Drive (OS and Page File)
• 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Buffer Hard Drive (Media Drive)
• 2GB DDR2 PC6400
• Crappy Video Card (nVidia 7400 or something like that)
• ATI HD TVWonder (Tuner #1)
• Pinnacle PCTV HD Card (Tuner #2)
• ChannelMaster Antenna (Not sure of the model but it looks like the CM4228 and when I bought it I ensured it was for the proper color zone for my area – I just don’t remember anymore what it is)

I spec’d out the hardware to be more than sufficient for what I’m trying to do. I know I can spend $100+ on a video card and it in theory help me, but even then I’ve read all of the horror stories with people with even better video cards (even ATI 3850′s) while also reading many success stories by people with onboard crappy video cards, so I chose to not spend my time and money with that attempt.

One thing that I have spent hours tweaking are things with my antenna (amplifiers, attenuators, new antennae, reterminating my coax outlets, etc.). I feel I have about as good as I can possibly have except for putting my antenna in my attic (I plan on this but for now it’s sitting in a spare bedroom at a window and I don’t expect much of a change). It was originally displaying my signal strength as 3/5 up to 5/5 bars. So I bought a ChannelMaster amplifier. The result was that all signals were 5/5 bars and the resulting quality was just a tad better. As you may or may not know, when you start amplifying signals, if you still have problems it is often because you amplify the good as well as the bad. With my distance from the city (15 miles from transmission towers), the main problem with amplifiers is boosting out of phase signals (from bouncing off of things) and this causes problems for you as well. A quick/easy fix is to grab an attenuator and add it to your line – it will filter these bad things out. So I did this and again, it improved my performance a tad, but was still not the fix I needed. At this point, I deemed my antenna configuration/setup was as good as I could reasonably expect it to get so I decided to rule it as no longer the problem.

Another thing I tried to tweak was the hardware. I tried adding a third hard drive to set the page file to it, no improvement. I tried upping the RAM even more, no improvement. I upgraded to a faster dual-core AMD CPU, still no improvement. I simply could not change the hardware configuration to get the results I wanted (short of maybe the GPU but as I said above, I know that this is not a requirement and I am forcing myself to not do that for various reasons, only some of which are money).

So what fixed it?
I stumbled upon a post in Aaron Stebner’s blog that discussed a problem with video stuttering in Windows XP Media Center Edition on AMD Dual Core processors and there being a patch to fix it. It was almost 2 years old and mentioned nothing of Vista (nor even in the comments that applied), but I figured I’d look into it a little more. That post led me to an AMD page. After reading through the various things there, it seemed like the only thing that could be applicable to me was the AMD Dual-Core Optimizer update, so I gave it a try.

Five minutes later (not even requiring a reboot), it was done downloading and installing and I was watching football in HD 100% stutter-free!

Soooo, if you have an AMD Dual Core CPU in an HTPC, go install that for Windows Vista (and probably for Windows XP too)!