Recently got a new machine with Vista on it and immediately downloaded VLC. It plays the raw captures from my HV20 but the quality is less than stellar. Will Windows Media Player play them? To be honest I haven't even tried... Is there a better app for playing HD clips?

Since you can't be arsed even taking 10 seconds to find out, WMP plays them fine on mine, although I use Media Center to watch mine on my HDTV, not sire if it does from a clean install as I have a few codecs installed on my system that it may be using.

Since you can't be arsed even taking 10 seconds to find out, WMP plays them fine on mine, although I use Media Center to watch mine on my HDTV, not sire if it does from a clean install as I have a few codecs installed on my system that it may be using.
:D Okay, I deserved that. But in my defense, I was posting from work; soon as I got home I tried WMP and it worked. However, it was "stuttery" for lack of a better word...

I'm really at a loss as I have a brand new PC. It's almost like it doesn't have enough horsepower to playback HD video smoothly...

nVidia has some really crappy drivers for Vista at the moment. I'm not so sure about ATI. You may want to try updating your video drivers, even if it is a new PC. That might help a little bit.

For some reason, I've also found the sample HV20 clips I've downloaded to be a bit (and sometimes a lot) stuttery when played on WMP on my Win XP 64 bit system, but far less choppy on WMP on another Wn XP 32 bit system.

Could it be my video card is the problem? Matrox Millenium P650 PCIe 128.

I checked the Matrox Graphics site and discovered a recent driver for Win XP 64 bit, released in May 2007. Installation of this driver has resulted in a dramatic improvement on WMP of the playing of one of the sample video clips (which was so bad there was something clearly wrong), but produces no improvement of the other clip, a scene of traffic going by on a busy street.

The first clip, with very little movement apart from a couple of seconds of curtains swaying in the breeze, was supposed demonstrat 24p, but looked like 2p. There seemed to be so many dropped frames the entire clip looked like a series of still shots on a tripod. At least now I can see the irregularity of the panning movements.

The clip of the traffic scene seems to highlight everything wrong with 24p, ie. the lack of smooth movement that one would expect from early movies of 100 years ago. There's no improvement here with the new driver.

Nero7 ultra works good in vista 32 as well as 64 (though it still runs as 32 in vista 64)