[MPlayer-users] Color/quality/blotchy issue...

[spowers at inland.k12.mi.us]

AHHHH!

I have been building a computer to play videos for quite some time.  I
have used several of the systems that take advantage of mplayer -- movix,
freevo, etc.  I have always had a problem with my videos looking poor in
quality, until yesterday.  It was working great, and like an idiot, I
reinstalled linux, to give myself a "fresh start"  (I had messed with the
kernel, etc trying to get my remote to work..)

I hope someone can point me in the right direction.  I will try to
describe the problem, and possibly try to get a screenshot and post it
somewhere.

The screen looks like I dont' have enough "colors" to work with.  Much
like a jpg photo looks when viewed in 256 colors, where the photo tends to
be blotchy, as the computer tries it's best to dither the correct colors. 
The problem is particularly noticable in scenes with a lot of bright,
similar color.  (ie, someone's face close-up is very noticibly bad)

I thought the problem was 16bit vs 24bit for Xwindows, but I'm currently
using 24 bit, and still have the problem.

Oh.. sheesh, should have explained my setup a bit...  Running -vo xv, with
24bit color at 640x480 on an nvidia geforce2 using the nvidia.o xfree86
driver on RedHat 8.0.  Have tried -vo vesa, -vo X11, -vo SDL, all have the
same effect.

I am really at a loss.  I know this hardware setup can display the
"correctly dithered" video, but I dont' know what I accidentally did right
last time.  The kernel work I was doing didnt' concern video, so I dont'
think it was my kernel recompilation that did it...

Has anyone seen this?  Would a screenshot help?  Anyone have any advice?

Thank you in advance,
-Shawn Powers