Anyway, I decided to try debugging. I installed the latest release of ffdshow, but that didn’t help. It doesn’t flicker all the time, but usually flickers the most often in dark or mostly black scene. I also notice the flickering only happens with .avi files (particularly Xvid). When I was playing some .mkv (H.264 encoded) files, they played fine. That’s when I realized that when I play .avi files in MPC, the little ffdshow system tray icon no longer shows up.

In MPC, I opened the context menu –> Filters and looked for the video decoder. Apparently it was using something called: FunBox Video Codec Filter. I don’t recall ever installing a FunBox codec and started to think maybe I had accidentally installed some malware.

Anyway, I did a bit of research and found the file that’s associated to this codec: FunVideoCodecFilter.ax. I started a system-wide search for this file while I continue searching for clues to how I got it.

I then landed on this page: AVI playback issues – weren’t even there days ago. It appears that the FunBox codecs came with a recent update of Samsung PC Studio 3, which I did update a few weeks back. I just never associated the two because I didn’t expect my cell phone software to be installing video codecs (overwriting the ones that were already installed), but I guess they do do some multimedia stuff. I just use it for my bluetooth synchronization.

Anyway, all the FunBox codec files are located under:
C:\Program Files\Samsung\Samsung PC Studio 3\

And I simply unregistered all of them:

regsvr32 /u FunAudioCodecFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunAviSplitter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunConvFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunDecFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunEncFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunEQFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunImgFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunMp3DecFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunMpgDecFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunMpgGrabFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunOggDecFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunSampleGrabberFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunSubFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunVideoAdjustFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunVideoCodecFilter.ax
regsvr32 /u FunVideoResizeFilter.ax

Things are back to normal now, and the little ffdshow icon shows up in my systray again. I still don’t understand why reinstalling ffdshow didn’t fix my codec settings. I even made sure the Xvid box was checked. Hopefully this post will help someone out there that’s experiencing a similar problem.