I’ve written before about the unreasonable difficulty associated with watching DVD-quality video on a Windows machine. Yesterday I finally figured out how to get the x64 version of Vista Media Center to play back HD video without the video lagging significantly behind the audio.

As I’ve noted before, video on Windows is hard because:

• Microsoft does not ship the codecs needed to play the relevant high-resolution video formats
• There is no standard source for such codecs.

I just repaved Wyoh with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, since I wanted a 64-bit OS and there’s no fucking way I’m running Vista on my primary dev laptop. I’ve been running XP x64 at work for a while, but my work box has shit on-board graphics so I never had to seek out the latest ATI drivers for a 64-bit XP install. Wyoh on the other hand has an embedded Radeon Mobility X1800 graphics board that really needs ATI’s latest drivers.

Apparently the OEMs that license the Mobility Radeon chips don’t like ATI providing the latest and greatest Catalyst bits online, since dumb users could download them before the OEMs have a chance to verify them, thus marring the user experience and (more importantly) costing said OEM a support call. Lame!

Fortunately, there’s a workaround.