WMP Image Quality

[Todd a]

I'm not sure when or how, but for some reason the image when playing DVDs with Windows Media Player is just horrible. I've tried everything but formatting the hard drive pretty much. The image looks all blocky around the edges of objects, like it is negitively Anti-Alaised. It gets so bad in some pictures, it looks like I am running it at a MUCH lower resoltion. I get a perfect picture with WinDVD5 though. I tried reinstalling WMP10 and got the same thing.

I double checked with some IMAX movies. The DVD disk looks horrible (worse than normal), but the WMV HD looks just great. I also checked DivX and it plays fine. In fact DivX looks much better than the DVDs right now.

[MuFu]

It's just the way WMP renders m2v... very badly.

There is a way to get awesome IQ in WMP - install ffdshow and use a good quality DVD decoder (e.g. the CinePlayer DVD Decoder Pack).

Definitely worth doing if you are serious about video quality. You can get results that are quite demonstratably better than WinDVD/PowerDVD. Here's a tutorial:

http://htpcnews.com/main.php?id=ffdshowdvd_1

[Todd a]

Well like I said I want to use WMP, but it handles DivX and WMV-HD just fine. It is just DVDs it is having trouble with. I already have WindDVD5 and it looks fine on that.

[Todd a]

As a side note to this, I finally broke down and get a retail version of BeyondTV. I was getting so mad with the Power Cinema that I uninstalled it. Every time I put in a DVD it would load up. I have no idea why, it does not play DVDs. It is just a peice of junk. Even if they did add a cable guild to it I can not imagine them integrating into the tuner to display show names for each channel and let you brows the channel listings while watching TV. Beyond TV also lets you choose reconding formats and bit rates and lets them be DVD ready to be recorded. This beats Power Enima 10 to 1. After my trial period was up after reinstalling my 250GB drive they offered me a discount... I took it. My trial ends today actually and I ordered the full CD version and should get it Wed.

Now autorun is set up correctly and one of the programable buttons on my TV Wonder Plus is set for Beyond TV... along with DVD Decript, DVD Shrink, WMP, WinDVD5, and IE. I wish I could easily program the basic button and that Beyond TV supported the FM tuner.