ATI Radeon 4600 flickers with BD burner

[ssmtoms]

I have a Gateway 4300: ATI Radeon 4600, AMD Phenom™ X4 quad-core. Connected to 1920x1080 LCD display via HDMI. Running Windows Media Center with 64-bit Vista SP2.

I already have a DVD burner and a DVD plays just fine on it. I just installed a LG - WH08LS20 BD burner and tried to play the same DVD. In Media Center I get flickering on the display. However if the mouse arrow is active on the display (it is visible on the screen) it doesn't flicker. When I move the mouse goes away flickering begins again. The flickering looks like it takes the last frame before the flicker and keeps superimposing it on the current frame as it plays the DVD. Sound is fine. As I said on my original DVD burner the same DVD plays fine.

My ATI drivers are up to date.

Can someone help please? I'm new to this (being an old Mac person). Thanks very much.

-s

 

[ssmtoms]

Update: I tried PowerDVD 9 and it works beautifully. So only in Media Center does it have this problem. So it's not the drive obviously. Is there some secret in Media Center I'm missing?

 

[JofaMang]

That might have been a codec issue, that PowerDVD fixed with the installation of its own Codecs, but since it worked on the DVD drive, I doubt it, though if the new drive has its own drivers that weren't installed, then PowerDVD might have its own hardware compliance profiles, circumventing the need for the drivers. Or it might be a Windows Media Center issue.

TBH, I avoid MS programs as much as possible, just for things like this. There is no reason for it not to be working, yet with a third party program, works fine. I find this happens a lot with MS products, like streaming video through my WMP to my PS3. It sucks, giving horrible framerates and pixellation no matter what I do, but only if it didn't crash my PS3 first. Tversity, a tiny free program does it like a champ, perfect stutter free performance.

For DVDs, I use Media Player Classic or VLC (again both free, small, and effective), though I can't confirm their compliance with BD drives, I can't imagine it should make a difference.