Windows Media Player - Need help with bad performance

**Citizen** · June 20, 2007, 06:37 PM

I am having extremely annoying issues with idiotic windows media player that I have NEVER had before in a lifetime of using the application.
I noticed the problem only this afternoon when the application began to respond slowly.
I open up task manger and then open WMP to play a music track or a video, I check the process in the processes tab and the app begins to use around 50 percent of each core, the memory usage also creeps up from around 30mb to 150mb. I check the performance tab and it’s using 90% of both cores (I have a C2D E6400). As tracks come to the end, they become choppy and start to skip slightly. Videos are choppy too, and the sound goes out of sync when you try to jump to a different section using the slider. When I close WMP, its process remains in the memory consuming just as much resources as it was when I was playing the track. It’s kinda impossible to do anything else with the computer at the time. The only way to stop it is to terminate the process from the processes tab. I tried restarting my computer (I leave it on 24/7) so at first I figured that was the problem, but it wasn’t, so I ran a virus scan, and that didn’t solve anything either.

I took two screenshots to show you how much resources it is consuming.
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2

What’s wrong?

**Gary88** · June 20, 2007, 06:42 PM

itunes, thats my advice

**Citizen** · June 20, 2007, 06:45 PM

no. that is not a contribution. that is not helpful. you are an idiot.

**Freddie** · June 21, 2007, 05:48 AM

Originally Posted by Citizen

no. that is not a contribution. that is not helpful. you are an idiot.

Look, don’t call him an idiot he’s only trying to help you.

Does your music and video play in fine in other media players (Real, itunes, Winamp, BSPLAYER etc). By the sounds of things WMP has got a massive memory leak problem or the .dll’s have managed to become corrupted somehow.

**sapi** · June 21, 2007, 02:21 AM

Hmmm - have you got all the correct video and audio codecs installed?

**sapi** · June 21, 2007, 05:56 AM

If you do try an alternate player, make it VLC (as it includes its own codecs and as such will play video even if your current ones are corrupted)

**Freddie** · June 21, 2007, 05:59 AM

Originally Posted by sapi

If you do try an alternate player, make it VLC (as it includes its own codecs and as such will play video even if your current ones are corrupted)

Ah yes good point, I forget about video codecs. It might he just needs to reinstall DIVX or XVID codecs to fix this. I also agree if you want to use another meida player VLC is a great programme and plays a lot of differant video formats like less known ones like KVCD.