dvds, youtube, live tv, etc...everything as soon as it goes to fullscreen it gets pixelated, even hd stuff
Ho Bob.. I hope you don't mind me jumping in here but I think I might be able to help you...
First, you should realize that compressed video (avi, divx, mp4 etc.) generally has a bad time with black level, as one of the others has already commented... It's not the monitor it's the video compression. You can make it a bit less obvious by angling your monitor so you are looking slightly down at it. Straight on or below and you will see the black blobs floating round.
Second, unless you are viewing raw video, the image is being resized in your software... this can cause some visual distortions and sometimes a bit of pixelation.
(IOW... no compressed video is going to play perfectly)
Ok... that out of the way lets get to what you can do...
1) In your System's BIOS look for a setting called PCI Latency (it should be in with the southbridge settings). What this setting does is make sure nothing hogs the PCI or PCI-E buss for more than X clock cycles. If a card finishes in less, it has no effect. Most PCI Latency settings default quite low, my ASUS defaulted to 8 and it caused me no end of grief... pixelated video, burbling audio, slow disk speeds, etc. I set it to 128 and haven't had a blip since. The problem is that with hardware handoffs to video processing becoming more popular, video cards are using more buss time if the Latency counter cuts them off it can affect the quality of reproduction.
2) From what you were saying you've been pouring stuff into your system trying to fix this problem... OK, take some time and clean it all out of there... ALL of it... Players, codecs, decoders... even go to Programs and Features and disable Windows Media Player.
3) Now go out and get the latest and greatest drivers for your video if you don't have them.
4) Go to Hardware Manager, find your video card, right click and Uninstall it.
5) Reboot your system.
6) When the confusion settles, install the new video driver and make sure your monitor is running at it's native resolution. What the codec boys don't tell you is that some codecs modify video driver settings... so lets get you started with a clean install of the drivers.
7) Now go to
Media Player Classic Home Cinema and download the version for your OS and install it. (You won't need any codecs, they're built into the player)
8) When the install finishes, run the program (Media Player Classic) and type an O (for options) then do the following steps...
a) in Formats, click the ALL button then click Apply.
b) in Output select the EVR playback renderer for video
c) still in Output select the Default Direct Sound Device for audio.
d) in Internal Filters double click on MPEG Audio and set it to 24 bits.
9) Exit the media player and restart your system...
Now take any movie you like, click on it and see how it does...
This has worked for me a dozens of times in both XP and 7. MPClassic almost always plays flawlessly if it has clean video drivers to work with. In fact, this is the only video player I've seen that will flawlessly show 1080p with an ASROCK ION 330 while streaming from another computer. (ASRock == Intel Atom dual core, NVidia ION video, 2gb ram, win 7 ultimate.)
For your games... look for rendering options in their setups, you might find that switching rendering modes there will help as well. There are several "built in" renderers in any Windows system. The "Overlay" renderer was the default in Win2000 but is poorly supported after. The VMR renderers were XP's default and are again poorly supported in Vista or 7 ... Here you want the EVR renderers. If the options exist try switching between OpenGL and Direct X and see which is better.
FWIW... Win7 is NOT better at multimedia. XP remains the system of choice for most of the really picky people I know. But, XP is getting dealt a death blow by an upcoming change in Hard Disk design so unless you plan using obsolete disk drives you will be forced to change over before Jan 2011 when the new drives will be coming out. (Old sector size == 512b. New secotor size == 4096b. XP is reportedly not being updated to accomodate.)
WHEW... I hope this fixes your problem...
