

I'm not sure and it may be not your case (does your graphic card have any? I suppose not?), but it's worth checking. It could be someting in-between the Transformer and GPU hardware acceleraltion. But when I turned it off my CPU usage dropped a lot. When you turn it off you lose capturing feature and all the video settings like brightness etc I think. The culprit was Built-in Video Codec/Transformer. Recently I noticed that my player uses twice more % CPU playing Ultra HD (AVC1/h.264 and HEVC/h.265) than for example MPC-BE (you can check it as well. I don't use Win XP anymore and I'm not advanced user, but I've spent some time fiddling with PotPlayer settings. Just look up good mplayer cache settings if you try it.

It really gives better rendering than either potplayer or vlc. I used smplayer (which is a GUI front end for mplayer) as my default in windows 7 and still do with linux. They recommend using mplayer instead of vlc, and it really renders better.

Like this netbook I'm using now that fortunately I don't use to play video on. I found a good article on the arch linux wikis the other day on how to get better performance with video that isn't well supported in linux. Some programs are just faster than others. They don't all have the same renedering performance, and in Windows I didn't find potplayer that great. On old hardware you should be willing to try different programs. frankly I don't think many really knowledgeable users use potpleyer. I don't find what I've seen on forums to be all that useful. Potplayer documentation is really bad but look for things like file cache adjustment, frame drop.
