Problem with quality of videos (ffdshow?)

[Rated R]

Hello,

I'm a newbie to the forum and my computer knowledge is very limited, so if anyone is willing to help me please keep that in mind. =)

The image quality of every video I try to watch in my computer lately has been bad. In the beginning I thought it was the quality of the video itself, but now that it's been happening to all of them it looks like there's something wrong. So I tried to take a screen cap with Movie Maker, and the image comes out perfect.

I reinstalled ffdshow some time ago. I'm not sure if it's related, but since it's the only change I can remember I suppose there's some feature related to it that is causing this.

The players I have installed are Winamp 5.24, Real Player 10.5, DivX Player 2.6 and Quicktime 7.0.3.

Thanks in advance.

[Baldrick]

Bad how? pixelated? brighntess? color? or how?

Try play with VLC, it has builtin video codecs. If same problem you might have some video card overlay problems.

[Rated R]

I've managed to take screen caps.

While being played: http://xs107.xs.to/xs107/06392/cap.JPG

Loaded on VirtualDub: http://xs107.xs.to/xs107/06392/cap2.JPG

[guns1inger]

Neither are what I would call perfect.

The virtualdub image shows definate blocking and artifacts (look at the beige wall behind the actress in the purple) and other issues. When blown up to the same size at the other image, these would become more apparent.

The larger image look like it has had some form of dither applied. This could be an ffdshow effect, or perhaps something from your drivers. You could try first turning off ffdshow post-processing (run the decoder configuration utility from the start menu), or uninstall ffdhsow to see if it helps.

[Rated R]

Oh I didn't mean it's a perfect image, I meant it's the actual image of the file, unlike the one I was getting. I unistalled ffdshow and reinstalled it with default settings and everything's good now. I guess I had checked something I shouldn't have had last time, though I have no idea what it was.

Thanks for the help.