Quality loss in all programs except for VLC

[Dozza]

Hey guys, when I play a video in Windows Media Player or another program or when I play dvd with Powerdvd there seems to be quality loss. The image looks "smooth" and "doughy" and not as detailed as it should be. However, in VLC player it's fine. Hope this makes sense.

I was wondering if someone could help me with this? Is it some sort of codec problem?

Thanks.

[Baldrick]

Sounds like a hardware acceleration/video overlay issue. Try start two windows media player and play same material. Do you see any difference? One will use video overlay and the other one not.

[hech54]

Run the video through GSpot and post the results.

[jman98]

Windows Media Player is such a terrible program that I really wonder if it wasn't deliberately designed to be as craptacular as possible. Honestly, you would do well to just stop using it forever and not worry about making it "better", which I don't think is even possible. It's bloated with DRM "goodness" and sometimes just refuses to play videos at all that it is theoretically supposed to support. Really, stop using it.

There's some kind of deinterlace setting on PowerDVD that might cause problems. You should check and see what you've got that set to and try a different setting. "Progressive" has been reported to work well for a lot of people.

VLC uses its own codecs and has more sensible default settings than PowerDVD so that's probably why it looks better. It may have a better deinterlace option than PowerDVD does on interlaced video. Or it could be that it's smart enough to not deinterlace progressive video and PowerDVD is stupid enough to try that.