Poor video quality

Originally Posted by Ageless Stranger

If ffdshow doesn't help then ignore my comment about codecs, from your description is sounds like macroblock decoding went awry. However, if it isn't decoding, then it must be rendering. Is the DirectX the "stock" directX ?

Yeah I haven't touched DirectX. When I run dxdiag it says I have DirectX 11 installed.

Originally Posted by Ageless Stranger

If ffdshow doesn't help then ignore my comment about codecs, from your description is sounds like macroblock decoding went awry. However, if it isn't decoding, then it must be rendering. Is the DirectX the "stock" directX ?

And also tried installing ffdshow, still same poor quality...
what a hell is going on here...

havn't touched directx as well and I am using ffdshow ...
I tried iroken's tip but it didn't change anything. I noticed that when I close the device manager and restart it, "show hidden devices" isn't clicked anymore.

I upgraded from windows vista instead of installing a fresh windows 7, maybe that has something to do with it?

oh and btw: what is ffdshow and is there a way to re-install it? maybe that helps but I don't even know what it is, just that I have it

regards

Edit: Noticed something strange ... I uninstalled all codecs on my pc and installed the newest version of ffdshow tryouts. But when I play a video in vlc no ffdshow icon appears in my superbar - isn't it supposed to?
Then again, I don't know if vlc uses ffdshow
Is there any other version I should try or any setting in ffdshow that needs to be activated in particular?

PS: Like I said before, OpenGL works "fine" regarding the quality of the video, it's only blurry when using directx ... so maybe it's related to DX11?

Originally Posted by BlackWolf

oh and btw: what is ffdshow and is there a way to re-install it? maybe that helps but I don't even know what it is, just that I have it

ffdshow = Free open source codecs based on ffmpeg, very highly rated.

Originally Posted by BlackWolf

PS: Like I said before, OpenGL works "fine" regarding the quality of the video, it's only blurry when using directx ... so maybe it's related to DX11?

Didn't take long to get to the crux of the matter, DirectX

Originally Posted by iroken22

1. Right-click on Computer
2. Select Properties from the context menu
3. Click Advanced System Settings on left
4. Click Environment Variables
5. Click New
6. In the variable name put devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices
7. In the variable value put 1
8. Click Ok three times

Now go to Device Manager and Go to View and click show hidden Devices. See If that helps with the codecs

Thanks, but they still don't show up.

Several things did, mostly Microsoft Streaming ... Proxy stuff.

btw, another thing I just noticed is that the videos show perfectly fine when showing them in their normal resolution. They are only messed up on fullscreen (kind of like a picture gets really blurry when you zoom it)

I use Winfast PVR2, which by default uses VMR9 rendering. Looks like absolute ***, quite frankly. However, when I switch it to Overlay rendering, it looks far, far better - at the price of killing Aero off. This also gives me no wallpaper until I reboot. Very odd.

I have full 1080P videos playing flawlessly on my install. I am running 64 bit Windows 7, using Media Player Classic, VLC, and PowerDVD Ultra. DXVA hardware acceleration is working fine as well. It sounds like you are having codec issues possibly. Do you have a sample video that looks terrible on your computer that you could point us to, so we can see if we can replicate the problem?

Originally Posted by zurih

I use k-lite codec.
Do you have anything different do offer maybe?

Well that is your first problem. K-lite codec pack is absolutely not needed. VLC on its own should play almost all file types without additional codecs needed. When you find a video that it doesnt play, which is rare, its much smarter to just install what you need rather than dozens of codecs which conflict with each other and are overkill.

I honestly doubt it's a codec issue. It would be affecting VLC and WMP/etc differently if it was.

Alright so I checked again after this post and noticed that only VLC has issues after re-installing ffdshow, so I guess it's a vlc-internal problem. Don't know if others still have issues on all media players. That doesn't really help a lot because windows media player has sucky quality anyways and I really want to play my videos with vlc - but it's a start. Does anyone know if you can force vlc to use the system codecs? maybe that would help since media player seems to play the videos "fine" (it's still not really good quality - for example black parts have a lot of grey in them in WMP, but as far as I know WMP always did that and at least the videos don't get all blurry, the videos play perfectly on VLC on my mac btw so I know it's not an issue with the video).
Don't know, maybe the problems will be back when I get home from work in WMP but we'll see ...

thanks for your help so far