Philips DVP-642 & BBC PAL TV -- Massive Color Distortion

[GrayStrickland]

I have several BBC Tv programs that a friend in England recorded and sent me. They are xvid encoded AVIs. They are in PAL format, of course, but my 642 is supposed to handle PAL/NTSC conversion on the fly. The problem is that the color is very distorted and blocky... sort of like a color photo displayed at just 64 colors and low resolution, but the sound is fine. They play fine on a pc. I checked them with Gspot (see below) and AVIcodec, but nothing seemed unusual to me. No QPEL.

I don't know where to begin to determine what's wrong, much less to fix it. Cany anyone kindly hazard a guess as to what's wrong with these files? My apologies if this query should have been posted to a different forum.


Gspot report (typical file):

Jam.and.Jerusalem.S01E01.avi
244,058,112
AVI(.AVI)
OpenDML (AVI v2.0), 40 504
Aligned 0 0 1
xvid XviD Codec(s) are Installed
00:30:09
45224 0.185 608 336
25.000 25.000
943
MPEG-4 B-VOP
1.810 .

[Squash]

Sounds like a custom quantization matrix was used when it was encoded. You can check it by opening the file with mpeg4modifier and clicking on "video info". If it says anything other than "H.263" or "MPEG" then that's it. If it is, then clicking the "system" button twice on your remote may make it look better. The file can be fixed by reencoding using AVIrecomp or using AutoGK with the "ESS compatibilty" option enabled.

Good luck.

[jagabo]

Press the System Menu button twice while playing.

http://www.jarnot.com/twiki/bin/view/Public/DVP642LisaBsAVIGuide