After installing Windows 7, video is pixellated

[creedo]

Installed windows 7... no hardware changes except it's on a new sata drive. Video card is the same. Reinstalled video card drivers.

Now I can see a tiny bit of pixellation. It's like the video card was using some sort of deblocking or smoothing before and now it's not. This is with all videos, and it's present in media player classic and VLC.

I found the deblocking settings (like SPP deblocking) in those programs but the thing is... even after seeing things visibly blur up when I turn those on, the smallest macroblocks (...I dunno if I'm using the term right) are not blending with their neighbors. It's like seeing a zillion 4x4 pixels.

The movies are watchable but not as good as before. Any idea what setting changed and where I can fix it?

[clsid]

It is a graphics driver problem. Install a different version of the driver, even if that means using an older one. If you got your current driver from WindowsUpdate, then look at the ATI/NVIDIA/Intel site for more recent drivers.

[stax76]

@clsid

I have a ATI 2400 with latest ATI driver and the problem persists, how do you know it's a driver issue and not a MS issue?

@creedo

Use another renderer like EVR and use the latest VLC, if you have this issue with VLC then you are using an outdated VLC version.

[creedo]

clsid: no go. I tried the latest from nvidia and no difference. But!
stax, your suggestion worked... I switched to the EVR renderer in MPC. That was the only renderer that fixed it.
EVR + ffdshow and a lil sharpening = it looks great.

Thanks for the help y'all.

[stax76]

@creedo

You can also use the renderers with custom presenters but you will be bothered to install a new DirectX version in recent MPC builds. Pan & Scan and subtitles unfortunately work only with custom presenters.

[clsid]

how do you know it's a driver issue and not a MS issue?Actually it is an issue with both. I have seen it dozens of times before.
Changing drivers usually fixes it. Otherwise switch to a different decoder using Win7DSFilterTweaker.

[creedo]

@creedo

You can also use the renderers with custom presenters but you will be bothered to install a new DirectX version in recent MPC builds. Pan & Scan and subtitles unfortunately work only with custom presenters.

And of course I jumped back on the forum as soon as I realized "hey I can't pan and scan anymore!" ... and then I read your post, switched to the custom presenter, and everything is now perfect. Thanks.

----

Also if you're the guy who made staxrip, thanks for that also. It was super easy making nice h264/aac mkv files from my DVDs. Totally offtopic, but my only complaint is I can't seem to force a certain resolution of 640 x auto in my project template. It says it's using that res., but as soon as I load the video it changes to something odd like 528... maybe because it shows a lower level of error?

If you're not the same stax ignore all that :P

[stax76]

@creedo

Probably a user error, StaxRip is paused until the end of the year.