ATi DXVA

I figured it was time to post about ATi's now long running DXVA bug, ever since Catalyst driver version 10.2 (means last working version was in January) ATi cards have been unable to render low resultion video without artifacting.

I have contacted ATi support (who said they would pass it on to the driver team) and posted it on their feedback form along with a thread on their forums (peer to peer only apparently), ATi has refused to acknowledge this problem let alone fix it so it looks like this is an intentional bug.

Reason they should fix it: Yeah sure you might say you don't need acceleration for such low resolution video but it's a pain to enable it and disable it constantly. It occurs in Flash, VLC and MPC-HC so having to fiddle around with options and restart the browser/player isn't what I would call optimal.

Gigabyte + USB + GPT = ?

Figured out why my external drives were causing the computer to freeze during boot, it seems the Gigabyte motherboard (latest BIOS still affected) doesn't like having GPT. If you want the drive to be plugged in during boot you will need to have it formatted with a MBR.