If you go probing around with an iron, remember the lead free solder melts at around 220 degrees, much hotter then the older solder (183). It does not flow as easily either. You may end up doing more damage then good. The FR4 (fiberglass) melts at only slightly higher then the solder (311) so use caution or you'll lift pads off the board.

Not that kind of solder joint anyway. The video chip has a whole bunch of solder joints on its backside - about a hundred little balls of solder in a grid pattern.

You've got to heat the whole thing up with a heat gun - ever so slowly, then put slight pressure on the chip then cool it down slowly. If you do it exactly right, without messing anything else up, it can fix the problem. My problem was that I left a nearby plastic sticker on the board - covered up with foil just like the instructions said, and when it heated up in shrunk and ripped off about a dozen surface mount components, that were all about the size of large grains of sand. I gave up when I saw that.

More like hundreds of balls or even thousands. I seriously doubt he or any one else who is untrained will have any success in reheating a Ball Grid Array (BGA). They make machines that cost 10s of thousand of dollars to do that and they are less then 100% successful. Those balls are as little as .5mm apart,with pads smaller then a pin head, even being unlevel can cause solder bridges. Most things with BGAs on them are now throw away items unless they are really expensive and that's part of the reason we have lead free solder (thank you europe). To much crap with lead filling landfills. Funny thing is, the parts are not lead free.