I've been baffled before with your playback difficulties, Larry. All I can say is that for all of the machines that I use MC on (I'm now up to 6 that I use fairly regularly), with a wide variety of hardware specs, CCCP works very well for MP4 playback on all of them.
A few things I wonder about...
MP4 is really just a container format, no different than an AVI or MKV. Saying it doesn't handle MP4 playback well doesn't really mean anything, because there can be about a million different types of MP4 files (unless the problem is with Haali at the splitting stage, but I doubt this -- it generally just wouldn't work at all if the problem was there). The important information is how the streams inside the MP4 file are compressed and formatted, and what filters are decoding that compression.
Is there a place where I could download to test one of these problem MP4 files? Where did they come from?
Assuming I can't get one of them to look at myself, could you analyze one of them
using G-Spot for me? (Oh, and RJM, the new G-Spot v2.70a handles MP4 files almost the same as it handles AVIs -- we're just waiting on full MKV support). Simply run the full analysis (open the file and then hit the
MS A/V button #1 at the bottom) and then take a screen shot and post it. If you're getting stuttering and other playback issues, and the machine isn't ancient, I'd guess that either 1) the MP4 files are weird somehow, or 2) some other filter or codec is getting in the way.
The nice thing about using the Quicktime engine is that it works reliably with a variety of different types of MP4 files and the install is easy. However, I can give you plenty of example MP4 files that look beautiful, but wouldn't play back at all using the Quicktime engine. For example, Quicktime does not fully support the MPEG-4 AVC specification, and coughs up its lung when you throw anything using High Profile at it. Plus, if you compare quality of playback side by side, with most source media (except those specifically encoded to work well with Quicktime) FFDSHOW will have vastly superior playback quality.
Short of that, I'd ask a few other things...
Do the files play fine in other players? Most importantly:
1. Media Player Classic (installed as part of CCCP)?
2. ZoomPlayer (ditto)?
3. WiMP?
4. Quicktime Player?
What other media applications are installed on the machine? Do you have anything by Real on there? Is Nero 7 installed?
Last, but certainly not least, I'd visit the
CCCP Troubleshooting page here and, if it doesn't help, the
CCCP Forums are full of people who'll be happy to help you. If you go there though, make sure to follow the instructions on asking for help in this thread:
http://www.cccp-project.net/smf/index.php?board=1.0