Hi
 OK, I did some testing to see whether an update in Vista has caused problems. I have a brand new install with all the latest updates thanks to a hard drive crash. I was forcing it to use the "Microsoft MPEG-2 Video Decoder" (which is part of Vista) and tested in both VMR and Overlay. I was unable to find any problems.

It seems odd that it would suddenly stop working on a computer where it was previously working. Going by the fact that it behaves differently on different monitors I would say it is a graphics card specific thing. Have you done an update recently that installed new graphics card drivers? You may want to try installing the latest from the manufacturers website.

Have you got any other computers you can try the DVD on? Does the DVD play in Windows Media player? (this is usually a good test of whether it will play in Screen Monkey).

You asked before how it chooses the best decoder. Well this is a bit of a black art but it is done in DirectX. Each codec reports its suitability to play a certain media type and then the one with the highest score is used. The problem is that you get a bit of a power struggle where each codec reports it is the best even if this is far from the truth. That is why you may need to override it every now and again.

 

I have had a thought, can you tell me what language settings you are using. This has caused problems in the past. If you let me know the settings, I can test with your language.

You may also want to try changing all the language settings to English and see if that makes a difference.