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New version of Widevine plugin is incompatible with Win7. The latest version of Supermium has a patch that fixes the dll, you can take a test on this site, but the digital signature becomes invalid, so it may not work on sites with protection. You can still replace the dll with an older version, but sites may not accept it soon.

Maybe it will be noticeable on very old and weak computers, but on my computers I didn't notice any changes. Of course on IntelHD there may be little sense to put a new driver, it's hard to call it a gaming graphics card, but for example on my nettop with Celeron N3150 processor old drivers cause blurring of fonts and interface in browsers, and the 2020 driver fixes it. And if you use the latest generations of Nvidia or AMD graphics cards, new drivers are necessary.

The driver is actually version 10.18.10.5161. It works on Win 7, but SHA-2, KB4490628 and KB4474419-v3 updates are required.

Each item in the Control Panel is a cpl file, it is most like a dll, so it is not easy to make a new item. Add Device Manager to the context menu of My Computer, it will be even easier to open it.

I meant to look for other programs or options how to activate the USB driver first at boot, it's the reason why the system can't boot. But since you found a solution, it's horribly irrelevant. Yes, you can't install a paging file on flash. And even if you could, it would use up the entire resource very quickly. Flash has a very small write resource. It depends on the flash drive, you should look for a faster one, then the system will work faster.

Yes, I have been able to make a portable WinXP on a USB HDD before. But although I think I used UsbBootWatcher that time, now I failed to boot the system, I get BSOD 7B. And the instructions in my link are for Win Vista+. WinXP should be done differently, first it should be installed as usual on another computer on HDD, then it should be configured to boot from USB (you should look for more options), then the partition should be cloned to a USB flash drive.

WinPE is not designed to be fully functional, so the drivers may not work there either. You need to install a full system, and to boot it from USB, use UsbBootWatcher: https://github.com/vavrecan/usb-boot-watcher

I've never used the installer, so I haven't even checked to see if it works.

CPU-Z 2.11 works again in Windows XP.

It is necessary that the device knows how to use the received data, hardware codec is not much different from software codec. If a software codec doesn't support the format, there is no way to make it support it, except updating. If you make the data to be processed so that the device understands this format, but this is already a software decoder, and the conversion will be done by the CPU.

Yes, especially since there aren't many suitable graphics cards, which further reduces the number of suitable systems. XP x64 itself is a stable system, after all it is made on the basis of Server 2003, but there are problems with drivers, so the stability depends on the hardware, on one computer it can constantly glitch, and on another will work more stable and faster than XP x32. If you set the "Enable CUVID DXVA processing" checkbox, nothing changes in LAV 0.70, I don't know if anything is enabled at all, because although this version officially supports XP, it doesn't have DXVA1, only DXVA2. In LAV 0.79, enabling CUVID DXVA breaks every video into artifacts.

I didn't take screenshots because everything is the same as in the previous test, acceleration with Cuvid. DXVA as in XP-32 does not support h265 at all.

Continuing my hardware acceleration tests on the GTX950. I have now installed Windows XP x64, LAVFilters-0.70.2-x64, the latest officially supporting XP, video driver 368.81, MPC-BE 1.7.3 x64, the new MPC-HC x64 I couldn't make work, and there are no other x64 ports, so I'm using version 1.7.13 x64. Hardware acceleration seems to work better in x64, there is no problem with h265 the first time, everything works, but the h265-10 bit doesn't work either. VP9 also works, but for some reason very low fps, only 10-14 frames, although neither CPU nor GPU are heavily loaded.

About LAV - it seems that because of K-Lite there were such settings, reinstall LAV, cleaned the registry from it, now VC-1 is enabled, but MPEG-4 is disabled.

Most likely it was used at the dawn of the BD era, I've seen a lot of BD disks, and they always use h264, or h265 if the video is 4k. Although, according to Wiki, some studios encode more in VC-1, but apparently I haven't come across such disks.