Recently bought a GS400 and am noticing a bit of weirdness when viewing captured dv avi clips on my PC:

-in some clips, the video image is breaking up into large blocks of pixels, especially around areas of movement.

-oddly, this happens in most, though not all, viewing/editing apps (ie, when I view the 'problem' clips on, say, VLC media player they look fine)

-I've tried capturing with various different programs, including Vegas, Panasonic's Motion DV Studio, and Windows Movie Maker - the problem is identical regardless of which program is used

-have captured from a PD150 with the same setup, and never had any problems

Anyway, thought I'd mention it, and see if anyone has noticed anything similar, or can point out if I'm just being ignorant in some way.

Nicholas, did you touch or move the FireWire cable while capturing?
I found the DV-in/out connector on the GS400 is not very stable and also got problems when I moved the cable sometimes. Recently this problem appeared more often, and after checking the DV-connector closer I found it was broken inside. Brought the cam to repair one week ago. Not returned so far.

Sounds like the problem is on the PC, not the cam. Especially if you can view the video with VLC with no problem. Are your hard drives defragmented and set on DMA? You are capturing to your system drive, by any chance? Do you have enough RAM (>512MB)? Are all background programs off?

If it's really a PC problem, and VLC is playing it correctly, then I think it could be most probably a video codec misconfiguration. VLC is using it's own internal codecs, not the Windows installed ones.
When I had some problems with codecs some time ago, I used a small program called GSpot to change some merits and it worked again.

Thanks for the suggestions guys,

The thing that made me think it had something to do with the GS was the fact that capturing from the PD150 works fine.

I only have one hard drive for my operating system and everything else - kind of bad for this kind of thing, I realize. I have lots of RAM (a gig) and DMA is on.

I'm currently fiddling around based on your thoughts, and will post any solutions, FWIW.

Thanks again.

So here's the solution: Andreas was right - it was a codec issue.

I wound up simply deleting a bunch of old codecs, everything I knew (more or less) that I didn't need. I guess there was some kind of conflict, because everything works fine now.

Apologies for posting my initial question where it turned out not to really belong. Weird that the problem didn't affect the PD150, but there it is.

Thanks again.