55" Plasma TV - a lost miracle

[Myke91]

I’m running Vista Home premium on an HP slimline attached to a 55” Plasma TV using my VGA port. The Video card is a Nvidia GeForce 6150 LE. I also have an HD USB Tuner and playback is done on Windows Media Center. Resolution is 1024 X 768 with a refresh rate of 60.

For the first few months everything worked fine. HD recorded playback and live HD looked unbelieveable good. About three or four months ago HD broadcasts (playback and live TV) became jerky – looking like frames were being skipped. When I reduce the size of the window, the HD picture looks normal. While playing, the CPU is loafing along at 30% and with two GB of memory there little or no paging.

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I’ve gone back level on the video card driver and tried different refresh rates. 60 does look a little better than at 85 but for the most part I’m still getting jerked around. If I had this problem from the beginning I’d accept that HD playback it just wasn’t going to work out. But since it did work, I miss the good old days of a few months ago. Other than backing out the last three months of Windows updates are there any suggestions on what the problem may be?
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Thanks
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Mike

[admin]

A couple of things to try:

1. In the Nvidia drivers, there is an option to enable 3:2 pulldown (inverse telecine). Play around with this setting to see if it helps. There might be other video/overlay settings (like deinterlacing mode) that might cause this problem.

2. Check to see if there is a mode on your TV that enables/disables something similar. On my plasma for the PC mode, there are two modes, one that will always convert the input to the plasma's native resolution/refresh, and the other will keep the original inputs and "zoom" in to fill the screen. Only the latter gives me a smooth picture.

[Myke91]

I forgot to add something. The problem goes away when I decrease the size of the window in which media center is playing the HD program. A few months ago, full screen wasn't a problem.