Viewsonic vx2235wm - Movies/Shows/Streaming are very blocky but games looks crystal clear...?

i just bought a Viewsonic vx2235wm http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as... and when i play videos(retail dvd's in my dvdrom, downloaded .avi's(xvid/divx), winamp shoutcast tv streaming) it is very blocky but when i play games the picture looks great.

any info explaining why the picture is blocky when playing movies/tv shows would be greatly appreciated. I am using the provided DVI cable it came with. would i get a better picture with a dvi-d cable over the monitors provided dvi cable?

(i do have the latest video drivers and latest k-lite codec pack)

THX!

Viewsonic vx2235wm - Movies/Shows/Streaming are very blocky but games looks crystal clear...?movie theatre

TV and DVDs run at 480 lines. So a widescreen DVD is a resolution of 853 by 480.

So you have about 2X the resolution of the highest quality a DVD can run at. Compression too can make the video look blocky as it reduces the colour depth.

Downloaded videos are even worse, as they reduce the resolution and increase the compression to decrease the amount of storage and bandwidth needed.

I do not think that you have a monitor problem. I think that your shiny new high resolution monitor is showing you how poor your video quality is.

If you want to test it, go to Yahoo Movies and download some of the 1080 or 720 HD trailers, an see what they look like.

Viewsonic vx2235wm - Movies/Shows/Streaming are very blocky but games looks crystal clear...?playhouse opera theater

The problem is that TVs are low quality displays: they are only about 320x240. You are displaying these low TV-quality DVDs and downloads on a high quality display, that is capable of 1280x768, or better! The high quality display makes visible the low quality of those videos. If you had videos and DVDs that were meant for HD-TV, there would not be any blockiness.