OK bear with me here, because I'm not sure what this error is called or how exactly to describe this... but I've noticed that, whenever I play a video (be it AVI or MKV or MP4, or XVID, or DIVX, or x264) I see some strange artifacts in the shadowy/dark areas of the video. For example, if I see a man walking and there's light on one half of his face but the other half of his face is in shadow, then the shadowy part forms this smooth, inky, blotched area. Other times, what happens is (taking the same example), if there is a window or a wall or something behind said man, and the part of the wall close to his face also has a shadow on it, then both those areas are... "crushed," if you will, together and they form a continuous "blotched" area. If I take a screenshot of it, I can see into the shadow area (like the man's eye etc. are visible) but during playback, that area is entirely obscured. I thought this was maybe a problem with the persons encoding said files, and that it was some sort of a compression artifact... I've tried Media Player Classic (I have K-Lite Codec Pack full installed) and VLC Media Player, and I get this problem in both. HOWEVER, I have just noticed that if I play the video in VirtualDub, I do not see this artifact. So what's going on here? I'm using an 18.5 inch widescreen LED monitor but I am not so sure it is a problem with that, is it? I do not have a video card, just this "Intel (R) Graphics Media Accelerator Driver," and a 2 GB RAM, I'm using Windows XP Pro SP3.
I would guess that your problem is due to the inferior onboard graphics chip. How do they look, when you burn them to DVDs and play them on your set top DVD player, attached to your TV?
Unfortunately, my computer does not have a DVD writer so I can't answer that question. But even then, if it is due to a problem with the onboard graphics chip, how is it that this problem of mine doesn't show up in VirtualDub? I just tried viewing this old b&w film I'd downloaded and every shadow and dark area is producing this dark blue blotchy artifact but if I open the file in VirtualDub and play it there, the shadows are all normal.
