Whenever I try playing an avi or mpg file in Divx, Realone Player, Winamp or Windows Media Player the video is all washed out. The sound is fine. I uninstalled and then reinstalled Windows Media Player to no effect. I have a dual boot system so when I boot into Windows Server the files all play fine - so I don't think there is anything wrong with my files or video card. I'm guessing that I need to correct something in Windows XP but am not sure what.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

try downloading and installing FFDSHOW

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ffdshow...12.exe?download

copy that into internet explorer, i similar to a codec pack, should fix your video woes

I forgot to mention that these programs all worked a few months ago. Not sure when they stopped because but I haven't really installed any new programs so I didn't think a program interfered with the process. I did download the FFDShow and it didn't change anything. I did open Windows Media Player - went to tools/options/performance/advanced/video acceleration and unchecked the "use overlays" under video acceleration. Now I can play the videos in Windows Media Player but not the other players. DVDs play fine in Windows Media Player but not in WinDVD - again they are washed out.

I lowered the hardware acceleration to disable DirectDraw and Direct3d Acceleration - now I can play videos in all players (albeit the quality suffers) but then I can't play DVDs in any thing. The DirectX (dxdiag) utility did not report any issues....so I'm still stumped.