So recently I attained a copy of Avatar with a 33,965kbps video bit rate (audio is unlisted when checking properties, but supposed to have DTS-MA) in MPEG-2 (.ts), so it's a 38.3GB file.

Relevant hardware:
-Phenom 9950 at 2.6ghz
-4gb DDR2 @ 1066mhz
-Radeon 4870, 1GB
-ASUS M3A-78T
-2, 1TB in RAID-0
-Dual screens, 1024x768 and 1920x1080

My default player, WMP11, (or is it 10? Whatever comes standard with Win7) played the video fine, but due to a lack of codecs, would not play the audio. Because I already downloaded CCCP months back, I was not going to download even more!

Next up, I tried VLC player, but the movie was soo juumpy. The audio was great, but the movie was far from watchable.

Desperate, I tried TotalMedia Teater 3 Platinum. I downloaded the trail version, got it installed and without having to change any settings or go through any type of setup process, I was able to watch Avatar and hear it!

I had the movie playing at 1080p on my big screen and Catalyst control, resource monitor, and probe2 going on the small screen to monitor CPU, GPU, and RAM usage, along with temperatures and fan speeds.

While playing the movie, I noticed a couple times where odd lines would flow through the video and distort the picture. I also noticed my CPU usage was around 30-40% on all 4 cores, but my GPU remained at 0-1%. I stopped the movie, checked settings and saw an "enable hardware acceleration" button. I clicked it, restarted the movie and vuala!

CPU usage dropped to around 3-5% (still had uTorrent running in the background), GPU usage increased, but remained in the single digits, and temperatures remained low enough that for a while, the 4870 reduced fan speeds to 0%...but that might have also been because I opened a window and the cool air from outside was getting sucked into my computer.

Something that does concern me though is RAM usage. As the movie plays, I go from using around 20% resources to 93-98%. It slowly just starts sucking up all available ram till nearly all of it is used up. What this will do is cause the movie to get jumpy for about a second when my background changes, which it's set to do every 5 minutes. Then, when trying to close the program, the computer just locks up for a little while, HDD's spinning feverishly, until it finally closes and there's an instantaneous drop from around 3.89GB to around 820MB of used RAM.

This player is also supposed to work with Media Center, but I have yet to try it out.

So far I've played only one movie and that was in 2.1 audio. I've not tried it in 5 or 7.1 yet. It's played the highest bitrate movie I could find and did so without even making my system think about working. More testing/playing will need to be done, but so far I am liking this software. Go try it out.

http://www.arcsoft.com/estore/software_ ... Code=TMT3P

Using the SPDIF output (yes I know that's compressed multichannel audio), it outputs the 7.1 DTS just fine. My receiver is not DTS-MA capable due to it's age.

OK so I read this right after you posted and didn't respond because I had no solutions...

But as soon as I found one, I ran to NICO to hopefully solve your issues...

"New VLC Pre-Release 1.1 with GPU acceleration"
- Apparently, from what others have said, 1080p Blu-Rays play skip free...

http://download.videolan.org/pub/videol ... .1.0-pre1/

EDIT:
IDK if this is even an option for Blu-Rays but maybe Media Player Classic

Ohh, VLC with GPU accl, nice! I'll have to check this out and compare it with TotalMedia Theater 3. Supposedly TMT3 works with Media Center, but I haven't tried that feature yet.

I'm using WinDVD 8 Platinum and it's fantastic