[MPlayer-users] Things (artifacts?) appearing in output and input - Help!

[AthlonRob]

I'm having a bit of a problem.  I had this problem several (8) months
back, but it went away on its own, so I assumed it was fixed.  Now the
problem is back with a vengence!

I'm getting 'things' appearing in video.  They're hard to describe, so I
did a -vo jpeg and put them up on my web server, http://rob.axpr.net/

That example there seems more extreme than what I usually get.  That's
the intro to Season 2, Episode 2 of the Angel DVD collection.

Playing DVDs is about as bad as it gets.  The odd thing is it does it
with MPlayer and with Ogle.

Now, I'm watching an old recorded AVI (Boston Public season premear) and
the artifacts (*are* those what artifacts are?) are barely noticable. 
They aren't on the original AVI, only the output from mplayer.  It
doesn't seem to matter if I'm using xv or x11.

AVIs I record with mencoder from my TV capture card are now showing this
behavior as well.

Ripping the DVD with mencoder seems to show the worst evidence of this,
it also complains about dropping duplicate frames and seg faults rather
quickly.

So we have any video encoded on the system is distorted with these
artifacts (verified by playing them on my laptop), any video played on
the system with Ogle or MPlayer is distorted with these artifacts
(verified they're clean with my laptop).... I don't know what to do from
here.  I even upgraded my kernel.  :-)

The system is based around an nVidia nForce board (nForce1, not 2) using
the integrated nForce video with the nVidia drivers, version 4496, both
for X and Kernel (of course, they must match).

I'm using kernel 2.4.22.  The config file is available at
http://rob.axpr.net/config if anybody thinks it might help.

The DVD drive is a plain-jane generic 2 or 4 X DVD drive.  The TV
capture card is a bt848 compatable card.  All this stuff worked fine a
month ago.  TV recording worked flawlessly last Wednesday night.

The CPU is a Duron 650, it has 256MB of PC2100 SDRAM in the form of two
128MB chips, supplying more bandwidth than the Duron knows what to do
with.

There are two TV shows I wish to record tonight and would rather not try
and figure out a VCR this late in the game... if anybody can help, I'd
really really be happy.

Thanks if anybody can help!

Rob