I apologise if this is in the wrong forum, but I did search and only discovered one case of someone experiencing something similar to this, and the thread had no solutions.
Basically, I've been using VLC for a while now, primarily as a method of watching .mkv Matroska video files. I originally had a 19" 4:3 ratio CRT monitor that was around 6 years old, it had become slightly blurry with age, but videos looked flawless. I recently replaced that monitor with a 22" ASUS 16:10 LCD widescreen monitor (MW221U) after it conked out on me and stopped working properly, and although the monitor runs perfectly fine in it's native resolution of 1680x1050, .mkv video files have a very artifacted look to them.
Some videos are less noticable than others, some are terribly noticable, I imagine because they are filmed with a "style" to them to make them appear grittier (Prison Break springs to mind).
Below I've attached some examples of some screencaps from the latest episode of Prison Break to document what I mean. The video is a CTU group release, I've never had any issues with their releases in the past and I get the same graphical grainyness with other groups releases and even lower resolution video files also, only the Matroska files are most noticable due to the increased resolution of the files:
As you can see, the images are exceptionally grainy in darker areas. Well lit scenes aren't as noticable, however it's still apparent. I never experienced this kind of image problem on my old monitor, but there's no way the small amount of blurring was making up for that kind of severe grainyness. The images are also not grainy due to the screencapture facility in VLC, that's exactly what it looks like when the video is playing, only it's more noticable because the grainyness moves around even in a static scene.
I've tried lower resolutions of desktop, fiddling with various settings in VLC and my video card (though nothing indepth as I don't really know what I'm doing
) and ended up resetting all my settings to defaults, no effect.System specs are:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 @ 2.66Ghz overclocked to 3.4Ghz (not sure if the overclocking would affect it but I figure it's best not to leave anything out.
EVGA nForce 680i Chipset motherboard
ASUS GeForce 8400GS (256Mb DDR2)
ASUS 22" MW22U1 monitor (Connected to video card with DVI cable)
2Gb Samsung DDR2 PC-6400 RAM (Dual Channel mode)
Windows XP Pro, all current updates installed
Nvidia Forceware 163.71 Drivers
Latest DivX drivers
Latest XviD drivers
I haven't installed the Combined Community Codec Pack because for some reason the last time I installed it I was getting weird freezes and crashes that could only be solved by a hard reboot of my machine.
Are there maybe any specific video card driver settings I should be using or a Windows Update I should perhaps install or remove? Any specific settings I can run in VLC to sort the image problems out?
Can anyone please help a poor guy out?
If you need any more information, please don't hesitate to reply or PM me, I'll get back to you ASAP.Cheers folks, hoping you can help me in some way!
Chris/KsE
