[MacGallant]

Apparently OSX10.3.4 has brought back the artifacts problem with the Radeon 9800 Retail and Apple DVD Player.

ATI fixed the problem with a new driver in the OSX 10.3.3 days and promised that future drivers from (ATI & Apple) would incorporate the fix but apparently Apple broke it with the OSX 10.3.4 Update.

[Lateralus]

This appears to be one of a few problems with the included Radeon drivers in 10.3.4. XLR8YourMac is reporting that many readers have claimed that OpenGL performance has actually dropped with the new drivers, hurting the performance of many games.

[bbtester]

I had been experiencing Matrix-like artifacting running across the screen on my system running 10.3.4 with OEM nVidia GeForceFX 5200 card with DVD Player. While searching one of the many Mac forums, someone suggested deleting the DVD Player preferences file which I tried and to my surprise, worked!

In Terminal or using Finder, go to ~/Library/Preferences and delete:
com.apple.DVDPlayer.plist

Restart.

[MacGallant]

Originally posted by bbtester:
I had been experiencing Matrix-like artifacting running across the screen on my system running 10.3.4 with OEM nVidia GeForceFX 5200 card with DVD Player. While searching one of the many Mac forums, someone suggested deleting the DVD Player preferences file which I tried and to my surprise, worked!

In Terminal or using Finder, go to ~/Library/Preferences and delete:
com.apple.DVDPlayer.plist

Restart.

I tried deleting the DVD Prefs, didn't work.

This is a known problem with the Retail Radeon 9800 Pro video card, ATI addressed it during the OSX 10.3.3 days and will address it again (hopefully)

[Luca Rescigno]

Yeah, they probably will.

One week before the 10.3.5 update.

[bbtester]

BTW, I forgot to add the the person who suggested deleting the DVD Player plist file also said to do it to the ATI monitor and some other ATI plist file. Since I got an nVidia card, those files didn't exist for me. Restarting is definitely necessary and this is no a permanent fix because I got the artifacts again. But deleting the plist file and rebooting stopped it.

Since the problem occurs on nVidia too and not for other DVD players, I think it really is the DVD Player's code. It either writes incorrect settings to preferences or somehow messes them up. If it starts occurring again I'm gonna save that file and compare it to the non-messed up version.

I've been using the DVI connection to a Samsung LCD monitor for most of my sessions. I did not see this on my Sony CRT when I tried.

[Cadaver]

Originally posted by MacGallant:
I tried deleting the DVD Prefs, didn't work.

This is a known problem with the Retail Radeon 9800 Pro video card, ATI addressed it during the OSX 10.3.3 days and will address it again (hopefully)

Also an issue with the Radeon 9800 Pro Special Edition, despite the fact its nearly identical to the Apple/OEM Radeon 9800 (just with an extra 128MB grafted on).

I think the issue lies in the differences between the retail and the OEM firmware.