Bad drivers for video card?

[Tim]

I recently got a Radeon X850 Pro 256 MB video card to replace my X700 Pro in my main PC for playing WoW.

I had to find usable drivers on the ATI website for it. The 8.5 and 8.7 drivers didn't work, so I eventually went to the older 7.7 drivers.

The video card plays WoW good, but it messes up in other things. Mostly in Windows Media video. Sometimes, but not all the time, the colors will be WAY off. People show up as light and dark shades of blue, the background colors aren't even close either.

Some videos play fine, others do not. I was watching part of one of my Online Video episodes, and it was all screwed up. Encoded in .wmv / Windows Media 9 codecs, which always played fine on the X700 Pro with its 6.14 drivers.

So might this be a simple driver issue, or could the video card itself have some weird problem?

[Tim]

Any ideas? I did some more work on it. It seems like most video that was downloaded works, but anything I have encoded in Windows Movie Maker still plays weird. The sound is ok but the video has the weird colors all over the place, and nothing is the color it should be. I upgraded from the 8.391 drivers to the 8.512 drivers and it didn't help. World of Warcraft looks fine on it.

I still use Windows Media Player 9 because I like its look better with the layout and control buttons, etc, but I doubt that is the source of the problem. I tried reinstalling it but that made no difference.

[Tim]

I've been messing around with it some more, it looks like a codec issue. I downloaded the new K-Lite Codec Pack 4.14, and if I let it install, it plays the videos fine. Further investigation showed that if I try to play the videos in Windows Media Player 9, as I've been doing for YEARS, the colors are screwed up.

But if I open the files with "Media Player Classic" from the K-Lite pack, they play fine. :confused:

Although it's very similar, I want to continue using WMP9, and even a minor change to Media Player Classic is asking too much. I tried installing the K-Lite 4.14 with everything but Media Player Classic, and that didn't play the videos right, and I tried checking all the boxes for creating file associations too, also without Media Player Classic being installed, and that didn't work either.

Any ideas? I have to wonder if it's some minute fault with the video card itself, as I don't know why drivers would suddenly be a problem here.

[Your Amish Daddy]

Windows Media Player whomps. MPC is where it's at.