I rip my TV episode DVD's to .mp4 files with H.264 encoding using Handbrake.  This format suited my purposes very well in Vista since the extenders support .mp4 files natively.

Now on Win7, I'm having video playback issues with most of the files.  For instance, last night we watched Flight of the Conchords, Season 2, Episode 1 and there was a vertical green band along the right side of the screen and the picture would continually flash as is someone was very quickly turning the brightness up and down.  The next episode had the same flashing but not the green band.  An episode of a different show had the same flashing problem.

So here's what's weird:

1. Playing in Windows Media Player has the same problem.

2. Putting the file into Graph Studio and playing it there looks fine.

3. I also have Win7 on my desktop and that is where I do the encoding. Playing the file in Windows Media Player on my desktop looks normal and does not flash or have the green band. The file does not seem to want to play on my desktop in Windows Media Center (although this isn't a program I normally run on my desktop).

4. The playback graphs in Graph Studio look the same on both machines.

5. Trying to play the file on the extender gets extremely choppy 4:3 playback even though it is widescreen video.

The ONLY codec I have installed (on both Win7 machines) is Haali Media Splitter. I did have AC3Filter installed on my HTPC, but removed it to rule it out as a problem.

I don't even know where to begin since they seem to be virtually identical Windows 7 setups but are having a completely different outcome playing the file. Actually one difference is that the HTPC has an ATI card (latest drivers and Avivo) and my desktop has NVIDIA (latest drivers) so I guess it could do with hardware acceleration?  Is there a way to disable that to test that theory?

Anyone have any ideas what I could do to figure out what the problem is?

Thanks!

When you installed Haali Media Splitter did you uncheck mp4 support? It is enabled by default. I've found having it enabled will cause playback to be instable at best. If you did not uncheck it, uninstall Haali, make sure to install the W7 alpha version and install with mp4 unchecked and shell integration unchecked.

Btw, The reason I suggest disabling shell integration is because I believe the remaining bugs in the Alpha are associated with shell integration. You lose thumbnail support for MKVs but for me thats worth it

Thanks for the suggestion, I will give it a try as soon as I can.  I believe I did NOT uncheck mp4 support.  I also did not use that version, I just used the version that is downloaded from the main link on the website, so that may have something to do with it.

 I uninstalled, rebooted, and reinstalled without mp4 support.  When I tried to play the file in WMP, it played video and not audio.  As I recall, that was why I installed Haali in the first place since it seemed that Win7 was not extracting from the container properly without it.  Interestingly, when I pulled it up in Graphstudio, it showed and played the audio graph but not the video.

I uninstalled again and reinstalled that new version with mp4 support and it went back to having messed up video and normal audio.

One thing that maybe I should mention, my mp4's have 2 audio tracks, the original AC3 track plus a 2 channel AAC track.  I honestly don't remember why that is anymore, but I had a good reason when I started doing it (something I was using wouldn't handle the AC3).  Is it the fact that the files have 2 audio tracks why I can't get Win7 to play the files with Audio natively without using Haali?

That could very well be, the native mp4 decoder in W7 is limited and I believe will only look at the first audio track. Have you triedAC3 Filter in combination with the native mp4 decoder? I'm a fan of Haali's Media Splitter but I only use it for MKVs.

Btw, if you are interested a table of the native decoders in W7 is available at: http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/p/78174/386291.aspx#386291

 Ahh, so the native decoder list says it supports mp4 but only with AAC and MP3 audio, at least I think that is what it is saying.  The AC3 track is the first track in the file so that could be the reason. Honestly, I don't know that I've tried AC3Filter with the native decoder as I installed it after Haali to handle SPDIF passthrough.  That will be my next attempt.

I will also re-encode this show with only an AC3 audio track and see if that makes a difference.