I also didn’t want to try typing the name, search suggestion helped me. I played a couple of his games and they weren’t particularly difficult, so I assume it’s referring to his later games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomonobu_Itagaki

I bet you read the fine manuals too, dontcha?

This may seem pedantic, but mp4 is a container that holds the video and audio streams. The actual video stream can be encoded im various formats (mpeg 2, h264, h265, etc). If you open vlc and look at the codec menu, find the video stream and report back the encoding type it may provide some insight. It could be that there’s a performance regression with a particular decoder or maybe they changed decoding library or any number or things. Sorry it’s a bit vague, but what I’m getting at is if we know the actual video encoding of the file it may help to track down the decoding performance issue.

If it does turn out to be mpeg2, it could be that something changed about how the video decoding drivers (kernel module) are loaded. Like maybe they stopped including them by default or are no longer being used for some reason.

If it’s not mpeg 2, then could look in to decoder specific changes between distro versions or hardware support related changes (like maybe a kernel module needs an extra config passed to it to get better performance on 3b), or even decoder library config may be possible to tweak. Sometimes performance optimizations make things worse and the new default configs work better on newer hardware but worse for you.

In any case, I think knowing the specific video encodings would be helpful. I also just remembered that I had some performance issues on some files due to audio formats if I was having the Pi software decode vs connected to an external AV receiver that could decode the bit streamed audio data.

What encoding are the files? Given that it sounds like this is an old set up and maybe old files, some raspberry Pis and I’m pretty sure the 3b was one as I had one, did have support for hardware decoding mpeg 2 (maybe others, I don’t remember), BUT this required purchasing a license for it. I never did, so idk what form the license came in. If it was a file on your SD and you don’t have it on your new installs, that’s my bet. Either that or newer software is more bloated or otherwise performs worse making the experience overall worse. Sometimes on old hardware, older software is the better choice (ignoring security of course).

Do you play any games with kernel anti cheat? I assumed a lot of anti cheat systems would have dropped support for win 7 by now. I stayed on win 7 as long as I could (I had non gaming compatibility issues). I feel like it was peak windows. Had they put the win 10 performance improvements in to win 7, it would have been perfection.