I got my Sony HDR-HC1 a week ago. Anyways, I captured some footage with CapDVHS and the output file was MPEG 2. I clicked the file to play it in Windows Media Player. It worked fine. It didn't skip any frames, it worked perfectly. But before I had the camcorder, I went online and downloaded some .m2t files from the Sony HDR-HC1, renamed them to .mpg, clicked on them to play in Windows Media Player, and it didn't work. It played, but it skipped and didn't work really well. So when I got my Sony HDR-HC1 last week, I captured some footage, it just started to play good. Out of nowhere, it just started to play normally. So it's working for about a week. It stopped playing good (Dropping frames, not playing smooth) today. Why? It just stopped. I went online and downloaded "Moonlight MPEG-2 Decoder Pack 2.1.4316" and installed it. It seems to be playing good again, not dropping frames, and playing smooth.

1. Does anyone know of a good MPEG 2 decoder that will play HD MPEG 2 files good? (25 Mbps MPEG 2 files.)

Here are my computer specs:

*2.6 Ghz Intel Celeron Processor
*1GB of 333MHz DDR PC2700 RAM
*I'm running Window XP Home Edition w/ Serivce Pack 2

I will "hopefully" be getting a new Motherboard (Asus P4P800-VM) and "hopefully" a new 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 Processor in about a month. So that should really help playing the HDV files.

Windvd seems to have the most efficient mpeg 2 playback capabilities i've seen and its decoder is windows compatible so wmp can use it for playback.

Next to that the free program videolan client or vlc as it is mostly called plays back HD stuff well but not as effiecient as windvd. This program doesn't install any codecs so you have to use it to playback the files, it isn't compatible to provide mpeg2 decoding for windows media player. - www.videolan.org


Neither of these programs will help you edit, just pure playback

Your likely running into a problem with multiple mpeg2 decoders so you should probably try and uninstall all but the one you want to use.