mpeg player????

[daveyg]

hello all.
im new to all this but want to know if someone can steer me in right direction as far as a player to play movies in the mpeg format. if i use wmp the quality sucks.
also, if i use a vid card with tv out, can i play movies on my tv and get the same quality that i do on my cpu monitor?
thanks for any suggestions.

daveyg.

[xzquala]

there is not much you can do to improve playback of badly encoded media.

if you are talking about mpeg 1 encoded media (*.mpg, *.mpg, *.others too) then the best thing to play them with in my opinion is indeed windows media player (version 6.4). if you have wmp 7.0, 7.1 of 8.0 installed, never fear, 6.4 is installed too, and the executabe is located (usually) in the same folder.

one thing you can do with 6.4 that you can't do with the others is access the playback filters properties. right click video when it is paused, click properties. on the advanced tab (I think that's what its called) is the filters, double click one of them to see the various properties each one has. some of them have post processing filters that may improve the appearance during playback.

personally I usually set all of the post processing filters to 0, caus eI don't like smoothing my video, but everybody has their own preferences in that regard.

to check to see if its just your hardware that can't keep up with the video, bring up task manager, if your processor isn't pegged at 100%, then your hardware isn't the problem, the video was just encoded badly.

one more thing, there isn't a good way to reencode the video without losing quality, unless you have the source that that video was encoded from.