Specific ways to optimize a computer for HD playback?

[homeuser]

Hello everyone,
I'm planning on doing a big HTPC living room makeover this year. I intend to use makemkv to covert my dvd collection to uncompressed mkv files. As most of you know, these big files are always more sluggish than the 100MB avi files that we are used to. I haven't tried playing a 50GB bluray file yet, either; only 8GB dvd files. My question is, what are specific things you guys do to optimize playback of these HD files. The issues I'd like to optimize are:
1) With the big files, it takes a while just for the thing to load in the player. Is there any way to speed this up? Other than adding RAM and other hardware improvements. I'm not asking for the best hardware. I'm asking for the best way to make your current system be fast, regardless of the hardware.

2) Seeking always seems to be weird with the big files. Sometimes, you can seek, sometimes you can't. Most of the time, the seeking is so slow that it makes you not want to even use it. Like, you'll click the mouse to jump to a certain position, then you have to wait 5 seconds until the video loads there, then you try to fine tune the position, but every click makes you wait another 5 seconds, so after a while, you just don't care anymore. So how can seeking be improved? better codecs? different software players? What is it that affects this? heck, sometimes you try seeking on these big files, and it makes the player crash completely. Each player has its own quirks with this HD stuff, none of them have satisfied me so far. I know everyone says that theirs works perfectly, but I don't think so. I've never seen anyone's setup avoid the problems I've mentioned here. It's usually just that it doesn't bother others as much, that's usually what it is.

Anyway, those are my questions. i figure the people here have had a lot more experience with this if you are using makemkv a lot.

[skittle]

1.) get your self a recent nvidia graphics card that supports full H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 hardware decoding and HDMI sound output.

Thats pretty much it, you can playback full bluray files on a intel ATOM with a good hardware decoding card!

[Icanseestars]

There is a good tutorial here on optimizing MPC-HC for playback of Blu-ray's.

Switching to MadVR output renderer greatly improves the seeking ability in MPC-HC (image quality too of course), however by using MadVR you lose GPU hardware acceleration support so you will need a CPU that can handle the video stream on it's own.