VLC playback blocky/pixelated?

garbanzo said:

despite its popularity and ease of use, VLC is not a very good player. its internal filters are definitely not the best available, and it tends to smooth the picture too much, causing apparent pixelation for most videos.

for a superior all-in-one solution, try KMplayer. for the best possible video playback (xvid), just install the CCCP codec pack, and use Media Player Classic which comes with it.

if you're dealing with videos encoded with H.264, it's best to purchase CoreAVC and use that with MPC (it's cheap).

Thanks for the suggestions!, ill have a look into each of them :)

garbanzo said:

despite its popularity and ease of use, VLC is not a very good player. its internal filters are definitely not the best available, and it tends to smooth the picture too much, causing apparent pixelation for most videos.

for a superior all-in-one solution, try KMplayer. for the best possible video playback (xvid), just install the CCCP codec pack, and use Media Player Classic which comes with it.

if you're dealing with videos encoded with H.264, it's best to purchase CoreAVC and use that with MPC (it's cheap).

Generally speaking vlc is a good player because you need not mess with the havoc of downloading all sorts of codec packs to watch a few differently encoded movies.

As to the CCCP I have had less then satisfactory experiences there, so I will stick to other players.

My video drivers where the ones causing the problems with vlc playback in the first place, I simply went to an older version and no problem.

havoc?

what's so hard about installing a few codecs to get good quality playback?

CCCP is basically just ffdshow with a few splitters added for good measure. using ffdshow with MPC gives excellent quality for xvid, mpeg and wmv. if you experienced problems using it, chances are you tried to run it on top of other codec packs like that bloated k-lite rubbish, or you just didn't set it up properly in your player.

i use AC3Filter for audio, it offers a great set of features, including excellent normalization.

Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative are two others i install, they also work nicely with MPC.

finally, Matroska Splitter (part of CCCP) for videos using the MKV container, and CoreAVC to deal with H.264 playback.

but enough words, let's let these screenshots do the talking :)

I tested VLC with KMPlayer and you can see the difference from the screenshots below, so I think its clear which is the better quality player:

John Henry said:

after installing shark007 codecs and using MPC x64 the result is pixelated as VLC, while it's not with WMP.

John Henry's problem was fixed in this thread.

It would be good if all I had to use was WMP but it can't play streamed .nuv files over the network from my mythtv box.

WMP also has less options during playback, like cropping and aspect ratio etc.

I suppose this would be a matter of installing the right codecs but VLC with play anything out of the box where WMP doesn't.

WMP 12 still seems bugged to me. eg. I just went to play an mp4 game trailer and less than a min into the vid wmp encounters a problem and stops playing but VLC plays it all the way through no problem.

i also was having issues with VLC, if it was a standard def file it would look grainy as can be and look absolutely horrible. the only solution i found was when watching a .mkv format file (12 gig file 2 hr movie) and it looked clear and sharp... for a minute. VLC would skip all over the place and i have radeon 4650 with 1 gig vram so there was no reason for it. i then downloaded and installed GOM player. everything runs smooth, no issues, standard def files sharp... its free too so go with that

that's really not enough information to troubleshoot.

what's the container/codec of your source?
what splitter/filter have you assigned to that container/codec?
what other players have you tried, and what's the result?
are you certain that the source itself isn't pixelated, and that other players are artificially smoothing the output?