[Friis]

Hi everyone.

My dad has problem with playing some of his DVDs on the computer I passed down to him when I upgraded to my current laptop.
Some of the DVDs in his collection seem to have their images split in two as thin horizontal lines with every second line being displaced about one inch to the right (19" 4:3 LCD screen... don't remember the resolution). They won't even play in PowerDVD but work nicely on Windows Media Player 11.
The GPU is an Nvidia GeForce 8600GT that I installed back when it was my computer. My dad says he's already updated the drivers for it, so they're up to date.
When we tried to play a store-bought DVD of Band of Brothers the Warner Brothers logo on the blue sky background showed the same problems although the rest of the DVD contents played perfectly.
Another store bought DVD we tried was Jurassic Park, this one had no problems whatsoever right up to the splash screen before the title menu. The splash screen, title menu and all the rest of the DVD content thereafter had this problem.
I've made sure my dad has a fully updated version of AnyDVD running in the background and tried playing around with some settings to see if it would help, but nothing did. That makes me think this is probably not an issue with copy protection, but more likely with a codec, I'm far from sure though since I don't really consider myself a computer expert.

A great many thanks for all your help in advance.

[fairnooks]

From what you describe they may be render borders that show up more in some resolutions and with certain media players, when playback contrasts are such that they are even more visible. A way to test that is to freeze the video where you don't think you are seeing lines and then stare at it closely for a while and see if you can still see the lines. I see artifacts like the ones you describe from time to time and its because the DVD was never designed to play back on a screen that is capable of so much more resolution than the DVD is actually capable without interpolation. If you ever see some screen tearing with fast movement and its along one or more of those lines that's another symptom.

Does the same thing happen on another similar monitor as well? If the lines really are gone at some times (not just very faint) it might help to adjust the focus phase or/and clock levels on the monitor if available.

[MysticEyes]

Well I don't see the need to have AnyDVD running. I would first make sure the LCD is running at it's native resolution. I would uninstall/reinstall PowerDVD.

You could try VLC as a test to see if it works right.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[Friis]

The so-called artifacts don't flash on and off but are there all throughout the clip.
For example when putting on Band of Brothers, the entire 20th Century Fox splash clip has the lines from start to finish, but the menu and actual movie works perfectly, and has no artifacts at all. That's why my first thought was that this was a codec problem since it reminded me of codec problems I had had with my own computer on specific media files.