I've been using various versions of ffdshow trying to find these "mysterious" versions that use less cpu time than others, but have had little luck. It seems the newer versions I'm downloading from random people are even worse at sucking up CPU power. I'm currently using an A64 3200+ running at 2.27GHz. I'm using Media Player Classic to run Xvid and h264 files and common cpu usage without any filters is like 40%. Any resizing or noise filtering shoots cpu use up to like 90-100+ percent and starts dropping frames. Current ffdshow I'm using is dated 2/3/2006 I believe, but not sure who compiled it. The really old versions of ffdshow seem to be a bit less intense on the CPU but do not have h264 decoding. The reason I'm concerned is I hear people running something like an Athlon XP 2600 that can turn on the denoise, sharpen and other filters and still get steady video output, but my overclocked A64 is being slapped around like a stepchild.
Just an update, I found some info finally on an HTPC forum that helped with my issue. I didn't realize so many different people were putting out versions of ffdshow.. and some of them are very poorly compiled. I guess that's what you run into with the open source community.
After jacking around some more I've learned that turning off MPC's built in filters was also trashing my CPU use. I turned those back on and cpu use is way down.
