XviD (and others) blocky or messy playback

[Kayser]

Hi everyone!
I'm having trouble with XviD (and DivX and maybe others) playing back... The thing is that every video I play looks blocky. There are more and less noticeable areas but the thing is that there are blocks and stuff where they shouldn't (I mean, it's not only one source, it's nearly every single one and I know they weren't like this because it's not my first time watching those)... I had a similar problem like half a year ago. That time it messed up with XviD, DivX and my previously encoded Real stuff, and the same way the artifacts appeared, they disappeared... I don't remember if i did something in particular that time.
I'm using Nic's XviD (lastest beta), ffdshow (20050909), no codec packs. I also tried Koepi's and get the exact same results. I tried playing the files on VLC, BSPlayer and Media Player Classic.
I'm running on Windows XP SP1, DirectX 9.0c, Athlon 64 2800, GForce fx 5700
I tried getting a clean system (and codecs, of course :P) install but nothing changed.

This is a screen capture to ilustrate my problem :P... It's not the best example, but you can see artifacts in the hair and armor clearly (while playing it looks more noticeable)
http://img251.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bscap0005jt.jpg
http://img37.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bscap0019ae.jpg
http://img283.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bscap0024oo.jpg
http://img293.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bscap0037cb.jpg
http://img293.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bscap0047dd.jpg

Thank you very much in advance and sorry to trouble you

[Pookie]

What if you open these files in VirtualDub ? Do you still see Blocks ?

Are you certain you don't have any boxes checked in the ffdshow settings ?


Test some of these files out - there are Divx and Mpeg examples

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~fhoesli/video/

Are you certain the problem exists with every media type ? You need to check that. If it IS, then the problem could be the video drivers and/or DirectX.

Try a different screen resolution (32bit,24bit,16bit) and try testing again.
To replace the Nvidia video drivers, do the following:
Remove the video drivers using NFR (nasty file remover- google it). This will get rid of almost all of the old driver files and will ensure a cleaner installation of the replacement Nvidia drivers. Also, look for the August 05 DirectX release if you decide to reinstall DX9.

[stephanV]

These look just to normal encoding artifacts to me... codecs block on gradients, nothing new :)

You could try turning on post-processing.

[Kayser]

@Pookie: Thank you very much for your reply... I tried opening a lot of sources (including the XviD and DivX ones from the website you gave me) in VirtualDub and I still see the artifacts or whatever they are. As for the ffdshow settings, I don't know for sure, I just installed it, I don't think I changed the settings but I don't know... Can you post a screenshot of the proper settings?
The blocks don't appear in the mpg videos, I checked and it's on XviD, DivX and x264 (the last one I don't know for sure since I only have 3 or 4 sources to check, they all showed the same kind of artifacts though). I tried installing the august DirectX since I had an older one and installed newer and older drivers but still the same... I feel like an idiot :P

@stephanV: I thought they were encoding problems but every single source can't possibly have the same problem... I tried postprocessing but still the same

[stephanV]

They are all the same kind of artifacts, blocking on gradients (which is a normal thing for a codec to do, in fact no codec is particulary good on that area).

Although, contrast and brightness settings of your video card do have an effect on the visibility of blocks, but there is nothing wrong with your decoders at least; that is ruled out by different decoders doing the same thing (VLC, XviD and ffdshow)

[Kayser]

Lol, so those blocks are normal? :P I tried encoding the sources I posted here to Real and the blocks dissapeared, I'll stick with that for a while... Thank you very much for your time!

[jon.schaffer]

I tried encoding the sources I posted here to Real and the blocks dissapeared
IIRC, Real has a built-in post-processing with deblocking. So, the absence of blocks may be due to a process which 'removes' them while playing back, and not to the ability of the codec to not produce blocks while encoding.