I'm using Winamp verson 5.541, which is the newest version.  I often connect my laptop to my TV and play TV shows and movies from my computer onto the TV using Winamp, but a couple days ago it stopped working.  Winamp will play the video on my computer, but on the TV it comes up with a maroon-ish screen.  The sound still works fine.  On another media player, VLC, the video shows up fine.  The reason I don't just switch to VLC (which I only got for playing .mkv files) is that most of my .avi videos constantly freeze and lag with it.  Does anyone know either A. how to get Winamp to show the video on my TV again, or B. how to make VLC stop constantly freezing and creating block patterns?

The only times i've had problems with VLC are when the video is encoded crappily (with crappy settings an dso the picture is very bad) or the AVI is broken, which makes it so you cannot fast-foward/rewind, but other than that it's easily the fastest, slimmest and best media player around.

goat is VLC codec-less or does it just have its' own library of codecs that it uses instead of any found on your system?

@Jeff - I can't recall doing anything before it started.  I installed a game not all that long before, but it was a game I'd already had and uninstalled.  It didn't affect anything before.  In addition, I watched things on Winamp through my TV after installing the game without any problem.

As far as the Winamp thing goes, I installed ffdshow, after the problem began, and it did nothing to help.  VLC still does the blocky thing with certain shows.  Futurama, for example, freezes constantly.  When I watch Ranma, however, it is fine.  They're all avi files.

@goat:  I have the newest version, and I tried changing the settings and things stayed exactly the same.