08-22-2007, 05:30 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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The Strangest Video Glitch I've Ever Seen
Yesterday on the PC I use as my media centre (Vista Ultimate) I upgraded to the latest NVIDIA video drivers, as well as the nForce drivers. I'd been having an assortment of problems with that computer, so I was hoping that a driver update would help smooth things out (you know, eight months after getting that computer with Vista pre-installed). The good news is that my #1 pain point with that system was indeed solved: when I was using Media Center to watch TV shows or videos, the video would sputter and stutter along at about 10 fps whenever the Vista control overlay came up (volume, skip, etc.). It was incredibly frustrating, but with this latest upgrade of NVIDIA drivers, everything is smooth as silk - just like it was with Media Center 2005. It's ridiculous that it took eight months just to get to the point where I was in 2005, but at least it's working.
This morning I started work in my office at 6 am, and by work I mean eating some breakfast as I watch The Daily Show from the night before. No problems with the system. I left and came back 30 minutes later, and here's what I saw on my screen:
Whenever I see distortions like that on a screen, I immediately think bad video card, or perhaps bad video cable. Bad monitor is possible, but unlikely. I was suspicious because I had just installed the 162.22 drivers - yet I'd never seen a video driver cause anything quite like that. I bounced around the Media Center interface a bit and the "sparkles" were everywhere. I exited from Media Center, and my desktop was fine - no sparkles. Puzzled, I fired up a few apps, and everything was fine. Thinking it was perhaps a one-time anomaly, I started Media Center, and they came back.
Next I started to play a video, and the above photo it what I saw - wild distortions and a near-black rendering of the video file. After a few seconds it resolved itself and playback was fine. But what the hell was going on?
I exited from Media Center, rebooted, and after the reboot Media Center is 100% normal again. What could cause this? It's possible there's some sort of bizarre conflict between the new NVIDIA driver and Microsoft's bundled MPEG2 codec. Or it's possible that my XFX 7600 GS video card is failing, which they tend to do - XFX has such crappy quality control, yet I keep buying them because they're the only cards that offer the features I want. At any rate I'm going to keep my eye on this situation and see if any patterns emerge.
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