I have been having problems as of late with video. My aspect ratio is spontaneously changing upon startup of video and results in a very skinny image, like only the middle third of the screen. This is not a consistent error, but has happened probably 5 times in the past week. My only recourse was to find the playback settings and rotate through the video filter choices, i.e., Legacy, VMR 7, and VMR 9, etc.
That is my main problem, but the bigger question is: what is all of this stuff??? I basically picked a new setting or checked/unchecked a box until playback worked. I have found a few related threads, but nothing like I would hope to find.
Another side effect of this problem was discovering that my dvd playback (almost always ripped to the HD) was affected. Choosing 'play', 'scene selection', etc. from the main menu is usually accomplished by the arrow keys on my ATI remote. After playing with the video playback (and DVD playback) settings, this feature was gone. It's obviously related to the video playback filter (or whatever) that I changed, but I have no idea what I did. Again, a little trial and error and it works again, but I have a feeling that now my aspect ratio will change in the near future...
I have a clean install with only CCCP installed. I am keeping this media computer CLEAN, only installing codecs as I have to.