Vista MCE & poor DVD playback?

[pnag]

Hi,

I've searched all over the web (and here) and not found anything, but if it's something obvious my apologies! With that out of the way...

I built a dedicated Media Center PC to "drive" my rather nice 32" HD LCD - a dual core 4200+ AMD processor, a gig of ram, and a PCI Express ATI All in Wonder X1800 XL card with 256 Mbs of video RAM. (Yes, there's a 120Gb SATA drive and an LG DVD burner in there too).

Now, when I built it about 5 months ago, I stuck XP Media Center Edition on it - didn't know about the whole MPEG-2 decoder lark, so had to sling PowerDVD on there too to be able to playback DVD through that nice shiny frontend/menu. Xvid\Divx codecs and the hardware ATI/Cyberlink H264 codec rounded things out nicely. RMVB even behaved and previewed as did MOV once I'd found the "alternative" installers. I was so happy trying all of this, I neglected to actually sit down and watch a DVD for some time. When I did, I was horrified! The picture had weird purple/green banding, ghosting and artefacting all over it.

I tried multiple MPEG2 codecs but couldn't check for sure if they were being used by the MCE frontend. Playing a movie in VLC or even Media *Player* was perfect, MCE, awful!

So, after some time of being annoyed with having to open VLC to watch a DVD I decided to invest in Vista MCE, hearing it shipped with its own MPEG2 decoder. Guess what?

Same results. DVD playback is as described. Any ideas, anyone, please? I'm at the end of my rope as it seems like such as simple fix!!!

Any and all advice greatly accepted.

PS Video drivers seem to make no odds, whether old or new...

[stewwy]

macrovision or some such sh*t ...google for a way of turning it off in your drivers I think omega drivers or ati tool may have a switch in their GUI

[Leak]

macrovision or some such sh*t ...google for a way of turning it off in your drivers I think omega drivers or ati tool may have a switch in their GUI
What, Macrovision on a screen not connected via S-Video/Composite?

I very, very, very much doubt that.

[stewwy]

his question ...it doesn't mention how he connects his monitor.
Macrovision has been known to screw up displays before, He seems to have tried most of the obvious things and the green banding etc is pretty typical of the macrovision effect from what I can remember. <br><br>

What would YOU suggest then?

[pnag]

Hi guys,

sorry, was away for the past 2 days! It's DVI, by the way, and I've found the answer to the problem - turn off interlacing in the ATI Catalyst control Center and it all went away.

Now, another problem! Installed CoreAVC 1.3.0.0 (worked perfectly in the MCE frontend), then installed Real Altternative and Quicktime Alternative.

Now it doesn't - at all! Any ideas? Tried re-installing CoreAVC, but to no avail...

[KoD]

Either Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative installs CoreAVC (obviously not a legit version). Try see in the install options if you can disable this.

[pnag]

Sure, yeah I saw that on the install and dutifully left it out.

Trouble now is, even after uninstalling Quicktime Alt and Real Alt, I still can't get CoreAVC used as the codec of choice :(

Isn't there a util I can use that "scans" the codecs installed, and lets me choose which ones to use?

Feeling very dumb, and wishing I'd not installed Vista :(

Cheers for the help though, guys!

[zambelli]

Most MPEG-2 decoders use DXVA. You changed decoders but kept the same hardware - so my guess would be that the video card either doesn't support DXVA well or the drivers have been messed up for a long time.

[Carpo]

you can try what i tried, tv in vista mce was being a tit for me (still is) after googling i found

http://mediacenterexpert.blogspot.com/2006/07/vista-media-center-decoder-utility.html

which lets you set which mpeg-2 decoder you want, depending on what you have installed - atm i have a choice between purevideo, powerdvd 7.3 and microsofts own decoder

might help, on a side note i see you tried coreavc, may i ask how you got mce to see the files - if your using mkv files that is because i cant get it to see them, not without trying some hacks i found while googling (which didnt work without messing up other things)