Ok, so, an update is in order I guess
Turning off Aero didn't affect anything at all; I'm assuming you just do this by selecting a "basic" color scheme, right? Cause that's what I did and it didn't make any discernible difference. However, my problem doesn't seem to be quite the same. It is extremely noticeable in all video playback, whether full screen or not. The one "benefit" of sorts is.. I can set slingbox to stream at much lower resolutions than the "HD-like" 1280x540 that it typically uses: the picture is just as bad at that resolution as it is at 640x240, and even lowering it to 320x240 only produces a barely detectable increase in pixelation. If I put it in full screen, it is of course slightly more overt since the blocks are even larger, but it's EXTREMELY evident even in windowed native-res views. Streaming from SD sources is equally degraded, looks like a moving mosaic.
A little more background I missed, these problems occur on a completely fresh install of Windows 7; I wiped the Vista HD completely before installing. I have since re-installed Vista on a separate partition, and at first on installation Vista seemed to be having the same pixelation issues, though not quite as bad. This was an illusion, however, because updating drivers and DirectX fixed it 100%, whereas on Win7 those things have no effect on the problem. I can take screenshots of identical frames in each OS in the same program, and literally, if you apply a "pixelation" filter at greater than minimum strength to the Vista screenshots, they STILL look better than the Win7 shots. I don't know what it's doing, but it's freakin' weird.
Turning off Aero didn't affect anything at all; I'm assuming you just do this by selecting a "basic" color scheme, right? Cause that's what I did and it didn't make any discernible difference. However, my problem doesn't seem to be quite the same. It is extremely noticeable in all video playback, whether full screen or not. The one "benefit" of sorts is.. I can set slingbox to stream at much lower resolutions than the "HD-like" 1280x540 that it typically uses: the picture is just as bad at that resolution as it is at 640x240, and even lowering it to 320x240 only produces a barely detectable increase in pixelation. If I put it in full screen, it is of course slightly more overt since the blocks are even larger, but it's EXTREMELY evident even in windowed native-res views. Streaming from SD sources is equally degraded, looks like a moving mosaic.
A little more background I missed, these problems occur on a completely fresh install of Windows 7; I wiped the Vista HD completely before installing. I have since re-installed Vista on a separate partition, and at first on installation Vista seemed to be having the same pixelation issues, though not quite as bad. This was an illusion, however, because updating drivers and DirectX fixed it 100%, whereas on Win7 those things have no effect on the problem. I can take screenshots of identical frames in each OS in the same program, and literally, if you apply a "pixelation" filter at greater than minimum strength to the Vista screenshots, they STILL look better than the Win7 shots. I don't know what it's doing, but it's freakin' weird.