Intermittent Problem - Poor Playback Quality - Vista SP1

[martini]

Hi -

I've recently started to experience a strange problem with poor playback quality using Placeshifter on a PC with Vista SP1. The symptoms are as follows:

1) after reboot and login run Placeshifter and everything ok - good playback quality video/sound.

2) after using PC for some time (say 1-2 hrs) run Placeshifter again video quality is poor and very 'blocky' - it looks as if the video quality has been transcoded/down sampled - but audio ok.

3) reboot PC everything ok again.

I have tried:

- checking all drivers etc.
- looking for processes/tasks that might be using excessive resources
- changing Placeshifter settings 'to playback without transcoding'
- wired lan and wireless lan - symptoms same

Only other symptom I have found relates to Placeshifter taskbar 'streaming data rate guage'. After reboot when Placeshifter works ok then streaming data rate guage doesn't show any data. When Placeshifter is showing poor video quality then streaming data guage shows streaming data rate. (It is as if when the data guage is working that somehow the video quality is degraded.

This problem symptoms are similar with SageTV Client so my feeling is that the problem is 'operating system' related. It also seems to affect webcam video quality as well.

Tried all I know to chase this problem down. Would be grateful to hear from anybody else who has experienced a similar problem or any ideas about further investigating this problem - many thanks...