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I just got a new comp with a DVD player and PowerDVD and the picture quality is TERRIBLE. It's worse than a tape. I played with the settings but it really doesn't get better no matter what I try. Suggestions please?

Try turning off Hardware Acceleration. Unless you have a hardware decoder, it'll do nothing but screw up the display.

Hardware acceleration works fine on PowerDVD XP (4.0) here -- and I don't have a full MPEG2 decoder, just the ATI hardware assist.

But post images or something (PowerDVD lets you save the overlay, IIRC) and tell us why it looks bad.

phongn wrote:Hardware acceleration works fine on PowerDVD XP (4.0) here -- and I don't have a full MPEG2 decoder, just the ATI hardware assist.

But post images or something (PowerDVD lets you save the overlay, IIRC) and tell us why it looks bad.

Not all video cards work correctly with PowerDVD's hardware acceleration function. Thats why I mentioned turning it off. Furthermore, don't the recent ATi cards have a built-in decoder? I know the original Radeon did (although it sucked ass at it).

Some of the blurriness at the edges is just problems with screencap, but the general fuzziness of the picture and the slightly washed out color is there always. The DVD's fine on my regular player, but the one in me comp's the only one in my room.

Sorry it took so long to post the second part, angelfire was being eevil. Thanks all for replies.

Looks like something's wrong with deinterlacing. Try forcing a different deinterlace mode instead of the default auto-select (configuration->Video tab->Advanced->Force weave [though sometimes Weave makes things worse]). Also, try changing the hardware acceleration setting to disabled (configuration->Video tab->uncheck Hardware Acceleration); my old Cinemaster-C MPEG2 accelerator really screwed up picture quality instead of helping it. I use PowerDVD 4.0, however, so some of these settings might be in a different location for you.

W00t, forcing the weave worked. Thanks.