Issues:WMV Playback Problems

Symptoms: WMV videos are not being displayed correctly with an ATI video card. A common symptom is all colors being completely off, or inverted.

Error Description: ATI's hardware WMV decoding is incorrectly implemented and tends to fail in numerous areas.

Solution:

Disabling WMV acceleration in the Catalyst Control Center

You need to disable WMV decoding.

Using the Catalyst Control Center:

1. Start the Catalyst Control Center.
2. Click "View -> Advanced View".
3. Go to "Video -> All Settings".
4. Scroll down to the bottom.
5. Uncheck "Windows Media Video Acceleration".
6. Click "Apply".
7. Close the CCC and reboot your computer.

If you have an older ATi driver that doesn't use the Catalyst Control Center, you'll find the WMV acceleration setting in the Windows Desktop properties:

1. Right-click the desktop and click "Properties".
2. Click the "Settings" tab.
3. Click the "Advanced" button.
4. Here, find a checkbox called "WMV9 acceleration" or something like it. Uncheck it.
5. Click OK, and reboot your computer.

You can also use the small free utility ATI Tray Tools to disable WMV decoding:

1. Install ATI Tray Tools
2. Right click the ATI Tray Tools icon in the system tray (lower right of start bar)
3. Go through Tweaks->Standard Tweaks->System Tab
4. Uncheck "WMV Acceleration"

The colors should now be correct.

Background Information: This problem is specific to ATI cards only. If you have an NVidia card, this isn't the solution you need. Nvidia produce a h264 hardware decoding program called PureVision, but as far as we know, there are no problems with it.