I have learned a few more things about HD Streaming since my last post. First of all, I changed codec packages to the Combined Community Codec Pack. If you are using the K-Lite Codec package, I suggest you do the same. More importantly, lets talk about h264 decoding.

The CCCP will use the FFDshow codec to decode h264/x264 files. The problem with this is that it is not optimized for dual core. Plus, it improves performance on systems with slower CPUs.

According to one of the more knowledgeable users of the CCCP Forums:
"CoreAVC 1.3.0.0 support multi-thread, means it has significant different in speed when playback in multi-core processor comparing to FFDshow which is single-threaded (Unfortunately until now FFDshow is not capable of using multi-thread)."

CoreAVC is NOT free. But it is worth it.