Further to my post yesterday, I discovered, via Nigel Dessau’s blog (closed by AMD since this article was published), that ATI will be releasing a fix for this issue in the Catalyst 10.2 (February 2010) release. This is fantastic news, thank you ATI!
For those that just can’t wait, an early release version of the 10.2 drivers is available from station-drivers.com. It is listed as “Version 10.1 (8.70RC1) WHQL”. Having tested this personally I can confirm success with a recorded episode of “life” from BBC HD, played back with my Radeon HD4850 with DXVA decoding enabled (~2–5% CPU usage with a Core2Duo E6300)
Hmmm. This issue is also still present in Denmark. DR-HD. The problem is still there in the 10.3 driver 🙁
Actually, what I said is entirely correct. My post is titled “ATI BBC HD Fix”. They HAVE fixed BBC HD. I’m sorry they haven’t also fixed the issue you are having with another channel, but I’m not surprised — as I understand it all ATI have done is implement a workaround for the issue which is really a compatibility issue between the encoders used by some broadcasters, and the Microsoft codec used for decoding in Windows 7. I have seen the same corruption with Intel and nVidia video, but (like the now fixed BBC on ATI) the corruption is only very brief at the start of viewing. This clearly points to a deeper problem that is not specific to one GPU manufacturer. I believe it may be possible to work around this for all channels on all GPU’s by using an alternative codec, but as I understand it there are only alternatives (e.g. Cyberlink codec) for Windows 7 x86. If you run x64 (as I do) then no such luck.
This issue has NOT been fixed. It may work for BBC HD (good for you), but I still get the bug for ALL French HD DVB-T channels in Media Center. The graphical corruption is now slightly different but more frequent.