I’d seen a few updates fly past on the unofficial Nvidia Decoder Store feed, and knew that Nvidia had finally (re) released PureVideo 1.2.

I didn’t rush to install it.

In the past, I’d have been the first in line, but recently, I’ve found myself hesitant to rush to install the latest Nvidia anythings. X64 might be starved for drivers, but if it’s a choice between certain defined beta flakiness and “oh my god, another failed upgrade and more bluescreening, I need to install again” from a release version, I’ll pick odd tail-lights in Grand Theft Auto, thanks.

Having just rebooted from the third bluescreen since installing PureVideo, and not having actually watched a video – let alone a pure video, as I don’t exactly count staring at a blue screen full of letters and numbers indicating that “CRAP! A serious effing problem just happened, and I was lucky to escape with my life, I don’t mind telling you. PS- it was NV4_DISP.DLL” while listening to some random sound repeat itself twenty times a second in the background as a pure video experience.

The Microsoft Error Reporting page dryly admitted that Nvidia didn’t really have an idea about what caused it, but they were pretty sure it was a driver issue and that if I had the latest, I should probably go harrass Nvidia.

Bugger that. Back to either 1.67, or the Intervideo codec.

[Update] Later That Night…

Okay. It’s been most of the evening now.

If I uninstall the Nvidia DVD Decoder and install the Intervideo WinDVD decoder, I can play DVD movies without bluescreening. I can’t, however, play DVR-MS files – GraphEdit thinks there’s no video filter installed that can cope with it.

So, I can have the Nvidia DVD Decoder plus bluescreen and hope they fix the video driver, or I can have stability with no actual functionality (it’s not clear why any DVR-MS files stopped working.)

[Update 2] 2am…

The Evil Tyke has just shown up and started mashing the keyboard, signalling time to retire to bed, but I did just manage to watch a DVR-MS with Purevideo!

The trick was to fire up a real DVD in Windows Media Player to get the WMP filter loaded, then right-click the Nvidia taskbar icon that appears, and disable the “hardware acceleration” tickbox.

It’s totally possible that other combinations of settings might also not blue screen the box, but I don’t have time to work through the permutations and risk Bad Things when tbe box crashes.