[OT] Vista MCE DVD playback

["Paul Gordon" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peeps, I'm doing my own research into this issue at the mo, but in
tandem, I thought it couldn't hurt to ask here, since there is just such
a wealth of collective knowledge here, that someone might already know
the answer, and save me a lot of searching...

I just rebuilt my media server, and for various reasons, I pretty much
had to go with Vista Ultimate rather than XP MCE 2005. Having completed
the rebuild, everything "works" but I have an annoying visual
artefact
when viewing DVD's, either physical discs, or ripped to hard disk.

Basically, there is what looks like a tear, going horizontally across
the screen, that appears during scenes with fast motion or fast
left-right pans in the image, and sometimes also after scene changes. It
kind of looks like I'm seeing the frame being refreshed, but at the
join, there seems to be a horizontal offset between the upper & lower
parts of the image, - it looks like one part of the image is shifted
sideways by a couple of pixels. The line is not in a fixed place, it
moves up or down according to where in the image the most motion is
occurring. This *only* seems to appear in DVD playback, - Vista Media
Centre's own test videos (the very attractive people playing pool)
played perfectly when I went through the various MCE setup procedures,
and I just watched an XviD .AVI compressed copy of Terminator 2 all the
way through without a hint of a problem.

The artifact I'm seeing with DVD playback occurs whether I use the MCE
interface, or just use media player from the desktop to play a .VOB
file.

Now of course, with the old XP MCE, there was no MPEG2 codec by default,
and I had to install MCE compliant DVD playback software... Whereas
Vista ultimate includes the DVD MPEG2 playback codecs as part of the OS,
and it's my working theory for now, that this is what is causing the
problem... - i.e. Vista's own codec is crap...

So, what I'm after knowing is:

Has anyone here experienced this issue & recognises my description?
Does my suspicion of Vista's default DVD software sound reasonable?

Also, as part of troubleshooting this, I think I'm going to need to try
to install alternate (i.e. better) DVD playback software to either prove
or disprove my theory, so I need to know what DVD software is compatible
with Vista Ultimate's mediacentre?

Any help or suggestions gratefully appreciated, because until I fix it,
the machine is almost unusable for watching my DVD library.

Many thanks

Paul G



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