Hi all.

I'm very new to these forums, and only joined after discovering the Vista Codec Pack. I apologise in advance for not using technical language at times.

I have the latest version of Vista Codec Pack installed 4.7.1 and am running Vista Home Premium 32 bit.

I usually playback all my movies (mostly H.264 files with a mp4 extension) through Vista Media Centre, or on my Playstation 3. The movies look very sharp. Recently, I've used Windows Media Player 11 as a media server and have streamed movies through to the PS3 with great results. Movies look sharp.

However, last night, I tried playing one of the movies straight through windows media player 11 by just double clicking on the file. The movie happened to be I am Legend (encoded by NewArtRiot on the Darkside forums. His movies are great). Now, I didn't notice anything straight away, but the nagging feeling that the picture quality wasn't as good as I remembered. I thought that perhaps my eyes were just adjusting from having watched a blu-ray movie.

Curiosity got the better of me, so I opened the movie up Vista Media Centre. Picture looked razer sharp again. I then closed Vista Media Centre and played back on WMP11. Again, picture wasn't bad...but it definately suffered from a "soft" effect and small details showed more a blocky pixel effect.

Now i'm wondering if this is a known issue with this codec pack. I have nothing else installed but this. I only recently built my computer and this was one of the first things i installed. In my old system, I ran Windows XP and happily used the K-lite codec pack.

Does anyone know why this 'softer' 'blockier' picture is happening in WMP11? i have googled this but to no avail.

thank you for your help in advance.

Kimbo