For those of you who, like me, are frustrated by the woeful omission of a dedicated 50Hz setting when running ATI drivers under Vista, I have some good news, and some bad news.
The good news is that there is one driver, signed by ATI and dated 25.10.2006, which is susceptible to the oft-mentioned-but-hard-to-find 'Gxo50HzTimingSupport' registry hack.
The bad news is that my copy of the driver was vaporised during the upgrade of my system from Vista RC1/2 to Vista RTM, and I cannot seem to trace it back to any of the previously-released ATI packages located at
http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/GRAPHICS-BOARD/ATI/
If the driver was distributed through Microsoft's Windows Update service rather than by ATI themselves, this would explain my inability to Google its location. Regrettably, it also renders the chances of recovering it disappointingly slim.
But enough of the doom and gloom: If by chance you are fortunate enough to come across this gold-dust driver (and if you do, please play nice and share it with the community!), or happen to have it installed on your current machine, here are the steps you need to perform in order to enable 50 Hertz playback.
1. Open Registry Editor (please note that altering your computer's registry may produce undesirable results and/or necessitate the reinstallation of your operating system);
2. Drill down to the key marked
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Video\
3. Locate the two folders marked '0000' and '0001' within this key's sub-keys--they're populated with a long list of entries such as '3D_Refresh_Rate_Overrride_DEF' and '3to2Pulldown_NA';
4. Create new DWORD named 'Gxo50HzTimingSupport' (without the quotes) with a hexidecimal value of 1 in the folder marked '0000'.
5. Exit Registry Editor and reboot to activate 50 Hz support.
