Tearing video on windowed mode only

[barryvee]

I haven't had this before, and I think it's something interfering but I have no idea what.

I have found the WMV videos will persistently rip across the screen every 2-3 seconds, but only in windowed mode. In full screen it's fine.

I'm using Windows Media Player 11 on Windows Vista. As I said it worked fine before, I don't think i've put anything on to break it. I don't think it's ffdshow, as I disabled it and it still didn't work.

Lack of 'horsepower' is definitely not an issue, I am almost certain it's software. Most other WMV files I have tested don't seem to do this either

Any suggestions welcomed.

[Frans]

Sounds like a graphic card problem, windowed mode is much more work for it. You might want to compare either filesize+time of movies that work/don't work or bitrate via GSpot. Based on the description I'd say some part of the display/refresh chain on your system can't keep up.

Were you able to play AW wmv files fine a couple of weeks ago? If so, which files and do the same files look bad now?

You DO download the files completely and play them from your local disk, right??

[barryvee]

yes, I download the whole WMV file, i'd hardly expect it can't keep up, the video plays fine in VLC, as do much higher quality videos.

thanks for some pointers. Now I think about it more, I suspect it's my video drivers. I'll try some different ones.

[Frans]

VLC is mostly decoding which prolly works fine yeah. Tearing is usually a driver problem. Just reinstall your current video-drivers, might fix it. Seems some windows update might disable your drivers back to software mode, easily seen when dragging windows from left-to-right.. they'll leave a sloooow trace (this was with nvidia cards btw)