ArcSoft Audio Decoder Pack It’s important to note that changing a filter’s merit probably won’t have an immediate effect.  At the very least you will need to exit and re-launch it to see a difference, but in many cases it is necessary to log off before the change will register.

Occasionally, adjust the decoder’s merit doesn’t fix the problem; and here’s where adjusting merit gets complicated.  Where there is a media type incompatibility between a filter earlier in the chain (generally the demultiplexer / splitter) and the decoder, the change really needs to be made to that filter instead.

As an example, I have PowerDVD 7 and ArcSoft TME installed on my extender PC which uses Intel G45HD graphics.  In order to get smooth playback for H.264 and VC-1 content, I need to split between the two application's filters to get hardware acceleration (HWA) to work properly (ArcSoft’s H.264 decoder doesn’t do HWA on G45HD; and Cyberlink’s VC-1 decoder produces jerky playback, even when HWA is working, on all my PCs).  There are a couple complicating factors taking the simple approach; first ArcSoft’s video decoder is an all-in-one filter (i.e. one filter decodes H.264, MPEG-2, VC-1) so we can’t modify the filter’s merit too low or it won’t join the graph when we need it, and second the ArcSoft decoder won’t connect to the Cyberlink demulipexer or vice versa.  Getting the Cyberlink H.264 filter to always take preference was easy, set the merit to MERIT_PREFERRED and it worked every time.   Leaving the ArcSoft’s merit alone (MERIT_NORMAL) and setting the Cyberlink VC-1 decoder to MERIT_UNLIKELY did not solve the issue because Cyberlink’s demultipexer had a merit above MERIT_NORMAL, and the ArcSoft demulitplexer was marked with MERIT_UNLIKELY.  The solution in this case was to set the two demulitplexer’s merit equal (I went with MERIT_NORMAL), and setting the Cyberlink VC-1 decoder to MERIT_DO_NOT_USE.

Getting everything right does take some trial and error, so don't get frustrated when it doesn't work the first time out (having to log off/on does make it any less frustrating :)).