Video settings incompatibilities?

[darcilicious]

My setup: SageTV client running on XP/MCE 2005 RU2 with a Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS card with the next to latest drivers installed.

In the default SageTV UI, I have the video renderer set as Overlay -- this seems to give me the best performance from the available choices (default, overlay, directx9/vmr9, and evr), though "default" works okay. I'm watching h.264/HD-PVR files from the SageTV server with this setup.

However, once I switch to SageMC (theme doesn't seem to matter), I experience strange video issues. With Overlay, I get a black screen when viewing video, and nothing shows up (e.g. playback controls, etc).

With Default, the video shows up fine, but the playback controls (e.g. "info", volume meter) are black. Using Ctrl-G to stop the video brings up the "stopped" popup/dialog but the four choices are blank (e.g. no text but four blanks). And then, going back to the main screen everything is black so at that point, I have to restart the client.

With DirectX/VMR9, everything displays correctly but playback is unbearably choppy.

With EVR, CPU utilization goes to 100% (AMD Athlong 64 x2 dual core / 2.20 Ghz) and doing anything like changing the volume brings up the spinning circle for several seconds, then the volume meter shows up for a long time, and generally response is unacceptably poor.

I have SageMC running great on my SageTV server and would ideally prefer to use the same on my XP client. Any suggestions? Or am I just out of luck?

Thanks!