The VideoLAN Forums

Playing DVDs in VLC always seems to yield awful video quality; I've posted a sample video below, but it would best be described as EXTREMELY "blocky." I don't mean blocky as in minor pixelation - I mean as in giant chunks of the video look garbled. I've tried numerous DVDs, and they all seem to behave this way - whereas Windows Media Player (and standalone DVD players) play them properly. The problem seems to exist when playing standalone .VOB files as well. Most videos play OK in VLC (.avi, .mp4, .mts, etc) - it seems to be specific to DVDs/VOBs.

Below is a sample vid. Please ignore the poor framerate; that's just a result of the screen capture software (framerate is smooth when viewing - it's the "massive pixellation" issue that I'm addressing):

http://screencast.com/t/L1r0Cv717i

wired, in my pc, I played vob files without any problem? where did you get these vob files? you directly play it by your driver or you rip them from some commercial discs? Maybe you can try to convert them into another normal format to see if this can help ?

As described, the issue applies to DVDs as well as VOB files. Converting some VOB files to another format doesn't address the issue that VLC is unable to play DVDs on my system.

From a post talking about the problem I was experiencing earlier:

I noticed a problem with VLC(all 2 versions) on windows 8/8.1. When I play 720/1080p MKV-s they're stuttering and lagging on some parts. I turned on the GPU acceleration but then i have image errors because of Nvidia gpu(i have latest drivers)

VLC Windows 8.1/8 Bug(MKV stuttering and lagging)

I have a gut feeling our problems are related, however. Try turning off various hardware accelerations:
DXVA, DirectX Video Acceleration (Input/Codecs > Codecs > Hardware-accelerated decoding > Disable)
Overlay (Video > Display > Accelerated video output (Overlay))
Hardware YUV->RGB (Video > Display > Use hardware YUV->RGB conversions)
And set Output (Video > Display > Output) to OpenGL, or try several.

Your clip looks like when signal starts dropping on a digital TV, which is a bit like my video skipping... except that I lose entire frames and you -somehow- lose pieces.

I'm running Windows 7, so I thought for sure that won't be it - but lo-and-behold, turning off DirectX Video Acceleration fixed it!! Nice find, thanks so much

(I'd note to the developers, it'd be nice if "auto" would detect these issues and disable acceleration accordingly. Seems like the default options should error on the side of reliability, rather than result in such horrible playback that I'm sure it ends up pushing some users - who don't bother to dig into the options - away...)

Anyway, thanks again!