I've had these trouble too when I used codec packs and stuff, uninstalling didn't help in my case, I had to reinstall windows and now I only use CCCP and nothing else (no VLC, no K-Lite) and I don't remember having playback issues with games since.

Shouldn't and doesn't are two very different things in the world of computers me boyo.

Yeah, I know, since I'm living in this world since 1988... But there are things that really stump me, like the inherently broken codec management of Windows. Install one to fix one thing, but break another. And there is never a way back other than purging the HD and reinstalling the whole OS.

The whole media formats are a living hell too - I don't know how many times the wheel was reinvented there - and just because of greed (licenses, patents...)

TT, had any luck with fixing it?

Was it Sacrifice?

Soul Reaver...

Try setting CPU affinity to 1 or 2 etc cores in task manager, using amd dual core optimizer or reencoding one wmv to see how things change.

erm from my knowledge extra codecs could eventually have side effect (that's not new) -> i banned them from a long time on my gaming rig.

just look at the larian support page there (full version)

http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=423177#Post423177

short version for your issue :

"* The game uses WMV which is natively supported by Windows. Do not install extra codecs. Some strange codecs or packs may have messed up your codec database and may have affected WMV playback. In some cases, codec related problems have lead to the game crashing before or after the main menu."'

so either you remove all extras codecs , or try a workaround which not affect the game.... (like mentionned above)

personnal note : i got some different issue with cutscenes (game crashing totaly) for Spellforce 2 : Dragon Storm

i updated my videocard drivers (Nvidia) + audio drivers (Realtek) -> problem solved. (worth a try too) . There's also the possibility your videocard drivers are too recent (there are some games in this case , unfortunatly :/ )

You could also try to diseable the hardware audio acceleration in windows -> just a try.

A workaround , could be to transcode the cutscenes in another format, which doesn't lead to those issues.

Removed all foreign codecs for the time being. No change. The strange thing really is that the movie files work perfectly outside the game - no matter what player is used. The stuttering only occurs when they are shown in the game.

hmm must be some driver issue or something. It sounds like the FPS is cut in half because as far as I remember those games have fmv's running at 30 fps. Maybe your are running nvidia shadow play or fraps? i don't know much about those programmes but i heard they can cut fps in half...

:/

well there're others possibilities i pointed out, after that i'm clueless.

I've noticed a lot of studdering on windows, more so before i went multi-core. Although your specs are probably plenty high, it can be on how programs have priority. A background process having the same CPU usage as your video player in the foreground.

Try this: Start the game. Alt+Tab out of the game. Open up Task Manager. Go to the processes tab, right-click on the game, change the priority to either 'above normal' or 'high'. You can also give other programs you know you aren't actively using as 'below normal' or 'low' which will make background processes work just as hard taking every cycle of unused CPU power... when your other programs don't need it.

Okay I tried a few things and now I've got another problem. I updated the ATI/AMD driver and now 640x480 resolution doesn't work anymore.

The following happened: I started Broken Sword (classic/ScummVm) and after a second or so when the menu was shown it suddenly lost the aspect ratio (went all wide). I quit the game and went to CCC and sure enough - the setting was changed to "fullscreen" instead of "maintain aspect ratio". So I changed the setting back to the latter and when I started the game I got a blank screen (monitor losing signal). In fact, the same happens when I change the desktop resolution zu 640x480, so it's not the game's or ScummVM's fault.

I remembered having a similar problem in the past that had to do with wrong display timings. So I fired up ATI Tray Tools and set the refresh lock. I tried 59 and 60 Hz but either this feature doesn't work anymore or there is another problem.

The game would work in windowed mode, but that one is tiny. Also all the other resolutions I checked (down to 800x600) still work.

O_o

As for Broken Sword, you can set a different graphic filter in ScummVM to scale the game to a higher resolution to get it working. Though it doesn't solve your general 640x480 issue.
[url=http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/User_Manual/Appendix:_Graphic_filters]http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/User_Manual/Appendix:_Graphic_filters[/url]