Anti-aliasing in Win98 but not WinXP

[MadMcMackin]

Hello all,

I have a strange phenomenon and I don't know what causes it. My system dual-boots Win98 and WinXP, and under Win98 DivX playback is smooth and, it seems, anti-aliased to look nice too. But under WinXP, playback is jerky and pixellated, especially under fullscreen. Below are two screenshots, the first from Win98 and the second from WinXP, at fullscreen, so you can see what I mean. Look at the lines in the still, for example around the shoulders of the character. You might need to zoom in, the original images were 1600x1200 and had to be downsized.

FFDshow is running on both, but I haven't used any other codecs. Both OSs are using the default Windows Media Player that comes as installed (8.0 for XP, 6.1.5 for 98). I've tried using XviD-1.0.2-29082004 on WinXP too, but it gives absolutely no improvement. Any ideas?

[MadMcMackin]

Windows 98 shot

[MadMcMackin]

Windows XP shot

[setarip]

Under WinXP, use the older, lower overhead, more reliable Windows Media Player v.6.4.

Desktop>>Start>>Run Then type MPLAYER2.EXE

[MadMcMackin]

Hi Setarip,

I tried Media Player 6.4 under XP as well - exact same result.

[setarip]

Do you have DirectX installed under both O/Ss, or only Win98?

[UncasMS]

looks like an insufficient overlay function

re-/install dx (as already said) and vga driver

[MadMcMackin]

I'm running DirectX 8.1 (4.08.01.0810) on each. I'm using a Matrox G400 Dualhead card, with driver version 5.92.006.0 on WinXP and 6.83.017.0 on Win98. Both are the latest versions released by Matrox.

The card passes the DirectX DirectDraw test OK. I've also tried running video with hardware acceleration turned off, no change. I did reinstall the graphics driver too, which didn't change anything.

I'm thinking there must be some obscure setting somewhere. I've tried messing with all the settings in Media Player but nothing actually changed the results. The only other thing I can think of was that I used to have an NVidia card installed which I replaced with the Matrox and the old drivers and NView software are presumably still on the system. I plan on reinstalling WinXP within the next week for de-creep purposes, so that might help. Other than that, is there anything else I can try?

[UncasMS]

though i woudnt think it will actually help, did you try re-installing the videocodec as well?

if not, give ffdshow a try

and what about nvidia files/registry settings?
did you try getting rid of all you can find?

[MadMcMackin]

Strangest thing - I turned my computer on this morning for another try, and the problem had vanished. I'm not aware of having changed anything, but now the movie is smooth and anti-aliased in WinXP, even in WMP8. Looks beautiful!

Stranger still, the audio on an AVI I was playing this morning was about 0.5sec faster than the video (displaced, not stretched). Then I came back to it this afternoon and it worked fine too.

Weird! Any ideas?

[setarip]

"Weird! Any ideas?"

Ghost in the machine ;>}

[zx50]

Originally posted by MadMcMackin
I'm running DirectX 8.1

I thought DivX needed directx 9, although depends on what codec version your using.