wmv video screen messed up help please

I tried to play a .WMV video on windows media player 9 pro, and the screen is jumbled, the frame is split in half and the part of the video frame thats supposed to be in the center is on the left and the video basically splits into 3 sections jumbled on opposite sides. It sounds weird and complicated but i really dont know how else to describe it.

imagine this is a normal video playing

[ABC]


this is what im getting


[CAB]

please help.

There was an identical post about this about 5 years ago here
http://www.moviecodec.com/topics/3066p1.html
Unfortunately I read the post too late to actually post a reply that would make a difference.

I’m really not sure how to approach this. Can you feed the video into GSpot and report its specs? I’m particularly interested in knowing the video codec and the resolution.
I know some codecs can give weird framing errors like that when you use odd numbers for one of the dimensions (width or height). It’s usually because the codec didn’t give a warning about encoding in an invalid dimension. As for remedying I’m not sure. You may be able to reopen the file correctly in VirtualDub (it mostly depends on the codec - not on what you do). If you’re able to, convert the file into another codec or at least crop it so it uses valid dimensions. Another approach is to use a different decoder for the video. For example DivX 3 files with odd sizes will give you funky output, but they play fine in VLC media player, whose libavcodec MPEG-4 decoder handles that anomaly very well. Beyond that I’m not sure.
The really lengthy way to fix this is to shift the image and re-encode the video. Since your source is WMV, it’s not very convenient to do, but you can try virtualdub with the wmv plugin from fccHandler. Not sure where you’d find a shifting filter though.