CoreAVC vs Libavcodec

Decoding HD h.264/AVC files may be difficult for some computers.

CoreAVC markets its superiority in decoding speed and is not a freeware.
On the other hand libavcodec is gnu (I think) at least free and part of ffdshow.

I use both, in fact I use CoreAVC most of the time for HD
Recently, I've discussed a problem with image turning into garbage due to the presence of kanji for ep 24 of Macross Frontier by GG.

This was a libavcodec problem, that disapeared when ffdshow is updated to the latest build (2094 stable beta)

Edit: had a problem with 2094 beta, updated to 2110



What do you guys use/prefer/think?

I think it depends on the player, on my old pc coreavc was faster, like a lot faster with some things, but there were times watching anything then with wmp11 would turn into a lag fest, also some things weren't as smooth as with libav.
If it works, coreavc is super fast, but when it doesn't its super crap, at least libav is about the same always.

I've always used libavcodec because my computers have always been fast enough to decode H264 without problem.

In the early days when there was only SD H264 encodes, my Athlon 64 handled that no problem. By the time HD became popular, I had already upgraded to Core 2 Duo, which decoded that without breaking a sweat. My current computer can handle 1080p H264 using libavcodec with only around 60-70% CPU usage, so it'll be a while before I need a faster decoder or a faster computer.

My old computer (2.66 Ghz single core) used to cry when playing HD videos. So, figuring that I could get another year or two out of my old PC, I downloaded a cracked version of CoreAVC.

Huge difference. Finally the videos could play without stuttering, and run well on my machine. Except for gg's videos. Always during the OP when they have two separate lines of karaoke, it would still slow to a crawl and fall out of sync. Part of it was gg's inefficient encoding, the absurd filesizes they have grown into, and my computer just getting old. So I payed for the upgrade to CoreAVC 1.7, and they eventually upgrade to 1.8.

1.7 made it much more tolerable. The OP sequences would only be half a second out of sync, and the ED's strangely always worked now. I would never had to track into the main part of the video to resync under any circumstances. Other HD broadcasts played smoothly too. With 1.8, the issue was completely gone.

CoreAVC make the playback so much more efficient. I found it to be well worth the price on my ageing machine. Now I have a Quad core, but I still had two downloads of it anyway.