I doubt anyone can help me but it's worth a try Here's my problem...

Every time I buy a DVD a encode it with the X-Vid MPEG-4 codec for high quality archiving. I have been doing so ever since early X-Vid releases. The problem I am having is, my old encoded movies play, but have an ugly mosaic pixelation throughout the whole movie...making it watchable, yet very annoying. The newer encodes play fine, however. Now if I play the old movies on a Windows box, I get the same exact problem....BUT...if I uninstall the codec FFDShow on Windows, then the old encodes play perfectly...weird...I guess my question is how do I uninstall FFDShow (if it's installed) on Linux. BTW I have tried Xine and MPlayer and both give the same undesired mosaic pixelation effect. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

you could compile mplayer without support for ffmpeg. then it would
use a different codec to output divx. or you could play with
/etc/mplayer/codecs.conf i think.

Hmm I'll try that when I get a chance and let you know, thanks