Divx Movies low quality playback

[Belgarath]

I have 3 systems, an AMD 1800+ with Gefore #Ti500, my main system, Celeron 1400 on a Via KT266 motehrboard with an ATI AIW-8500DV and a P3 600Mhz laptop with an 4Mb ATI Rage Mobilty
On all 3 systems I installed Win2000 and dx9.
On all 3 system I installed the Tsunami codec pack 3.9.7.
i played the movies with WMP 6.4 and BSPlayer 086-493.

The problem is that on my AMD system and the laptop a selfmade movie plays back fine (video 1600kbit DivX 4.12, audio AC3 5.1 448kbit), the quality is excellent, it looks on the screen (monitor) like every pixel is decoded by it self, CPU-utilisation is 37% (AMD system) while playing.

On the Celeron system the movie plays back fine too, 25fps, AC3 5.1 sound, but I can see that unlike on the AMD machine and the laptop, not every pixel is decoded by itself. I can see areas (especially areas with subtle colour-differences on the AMD machine and the laptop) that are just 1 colour sometimes as big as a couple of square centimeters.

I have tried every possible setting of the ffdshow filter, but to no avail.
As the movie plays fine on my P3 600, I surmised it cannot be a cpu-power problem, in my opinion it is a codec problem...

Does anyone have any idea what i can do about it?
(Apart from installing Win2000 and starting all over again for the seventh time :-))

Thanks, Belgarath

[UncasMS]

try to have the decoding done by the codec (divx or xvid or whatever) and NOT by ffdshow.

maybe it'll make a difference

[Belgarath]

Ok, I tried that by uninstalling the filters and other software I didn't need using the tsunami-uninstall.

No difference, I hoope I don't need to reinstall Win2000 to fix this.

To play movies, I guess i only need:
DivX 3.11 codec
DivX 4.12 codec
DivX 5.03 codec
AC3-codec
Frauenhofer MP3 codec

Can you think of anything else?

Belgarath

[UncasMS]

- no i cant think of another codec that you might need

- de-installing was NOT necessary at all.
to prvent ffdshow from playing pack any particular filter/codec simply run ffdshow configuration, go to CODECS and uncheck the filter you dont want to have played by ffdshow.

- maybe your vga driver are to blame? or direct-x.

[Belgarath]

Well, I have DirectX 9 installed on all 3 machines.
I also downloaded the latest ATI drivers for my AIW-8500DV and reinstalled Windows 2000 with just Divx 5.03, 4.12, mp3 and AC3 codecs installed.

Same results.

I'm gonna try another videocard in the system, an "old" TNT2 Ultra.
Although I can't imagine it's a video-card processing power problem, at least I can test if the drivers are to blame.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Belgarath