Turn of fancy graphics for a less twitchy UI

[stevehiner]

On my system the UI refreshes too much. The whole desktop blinks and VRD redraws itself. Not sure what interaction is causing this but it's quite annoying. It happens every few seconds when I'm watching a video and the audio pauses during the refresh so it gets quite annoying.

In the background I'm typically running the BeyondTV viewscape minimized, Outlook 2003 minimized and several IE sessions miminized.

I'm assuming it's caused by your fancy-schmancy interface (which looks quite nice, by the way). I'd rather have the option of going to standard windows buttons and background to make it less twitchy.

[DanR]

The problem is most likely the DirectX driver for your video card. On Tools>Options>Devices page, enabel the YUV acceleration. That should help a lot.

[stevehiner]

Ah ha!

My current video card doesn't support DirectX. Bet you didn't see THAT one coming did you?

Actually that makes perfect sense.

The only reason my current card doesn't support DirectX is because I'm using an ancient PCI Voodoo 3 card right now while MSI tries (so far without success) to repair my Geforce card. I've sent it to them twice so far and both times it's come back worse than I sent it. Most recently it seems to have nuked about 120GB of video on my RAID drives - not sure yet if it took out a drive or the RAID controller. I'm not very happy with MSI right now.

[DanR]

Didn't see that one. :D

How about purchasing a $15-$20 graphics card. They all have YUV acceleration now, even the least expensive cards.

[stevehiner]

Because, darn-it-all, my video card is still under warranty and MSI should fix it for me.

Originally the fan seized so I sent it in.
They put on a new fan but 800x600 quick working - bad resolution to fail for any HTPC.
I sent it back, they replaced a chip.
Now the fan sounds like a coffee grinder and it nuked my RAID drives.

Now I'm gonna send it back again (yet another 3 weeks turn around) and I don't know how badly it's going to damage my system when I get it back.

Note: not one iota of that "darn-it-all" is directed at you, I reserve all my anger for MSI at the moment. At this point I want it repaired on priciple and I don't want to spend any more money than I have to - I'll already have paid for at least 3 shipping fees by the time I'm done.