DVD-movies play choppy!

[OK]

System : Asus A7V 133 motherboard, T-bird 1333, 60 Gb IBM HD, Samsung CD/CDR/DVD combo drive (32/8/8) model SM308, Soundblaster 128, ASUS Geforce 2 MX, Firewire card, TV tuner card. Win ME.

Problem : The DVD's I play run choppy, both if I use PowerDVD (came with CD-drive) or PCFriendly DVD. The sound is usually continous, but it also has some irritating crackles in it. Sometimes there are also a couple seconds where the movie simply freezes, before either continuing or crashing the DVD player. The Macromedia Flash sequences in the beginning of some DVD's are even choppier, with small "bursts" of video and then second-long pauses in between.

The combo-drive seems to work fine when burning or playing ordinary CD's, but there sometimes is a crackling in my speakers even when I havent tried playing a DVD. I know its not the speakers themselves because I have tried different ones.

I have tried enabling / disabling DMA-mode in windows ME but no change. I have installed the bus master drivers that came with the motherboard. On bootup, the system recognises the drive as a PIO 4 device, and I cant change that from the BIOS.

What is going on? Surely this system should be able to play DVD's smoothly? My system seems very fast in other applications like games.

If anyone has had any similar problems and know how to fix it, please reply here. Thanks.

[otheos]

Many possiblities there.

The system is perfectly capable of playing DVD's don;t worry about that.

Now, two questions:
1. Where is the DVD connected? on the promise IDEs or the VIA? Is it primary/secondary master/slave? Anything else on the same cable?

2. In which slot is the SB128 placed? What drivers do you use? Make sure the SB is in slot 3 (the 3rd PCI slot after the AGP). If the crankling sound persists, remove the drivers from creative and use the MS ones. If that works look for newer drivers (or older) or stick to the MS's ones.

I presume nothing else is running while playing the DVD. check with ALT+CTRL+DEL (once) if there are programs still running eventhough I am quite sure the problem lies in the reading of the DVD rather than playback.

Does the combo perform otherwise ok? it reads CD/RW ok? It burns ok?

You can also look for help here , and at www.amdmb.com forums.

[booya]

when u use power dvd enable hardware acceleration it might help

[OK]

Hello, and thanks for the replies.

The combo is secondary master, no primary or secondary slaves.

My motherboard does not have RAID. The drives are connected to the on-board IDE1 and IDE2-connectors on the MB.

My SB128 is not currently in slot 3, its in slot 2. I will change it in the morning (night here now), and report back the result. I use drivers that came on the SB128 driver CD.

Nothing else is running while I try to play DVD's, except the DirectCD wizard.

I have not tested if the combo can read CD RW's, but it reads and burns ordinary CDs just fine. However, it seems to recognise DVD's as CD-RW's (when clicking Properties in Windows Explorer). The DVD's still autoplay, though.

PowerDVD will not work with hardware acceleration enabled, since I do not have a decoder card.

[otheos]

Kill DirectCD wizard!! try again with it not running. Hopefully your system will recognize the DVD as DVD.

Do not move the SB128 yet (it's trouble). try everything else first. Stop DirectCD, change the SB drivers (use the default drivers of Windows) and then change the SB to slot3.
Since your mobo hasn't got the Promise, slot2 does not share an IRQ so changing to slot3 might not be that hopefull.

[This message has been edited by otheos (edited 07-25-2001).]

[OK]

Hi, I have now changed the Soundblaster to slot 3. This seems to have lessened the crackle in DVD's, but the speakers still crackle a couple of times a minute after I have exited the WebTV application on the Pinnacle Studio PCTV capture card. Windows now recognizes the card as Soundblaster AudioPCI.

I removed DirectCD from the systray. I can actually see DVD films now in PCFriendly DVD (film goes smoothly, no crackling the few minutes I have tested it until now). The movie is still choppy in PowerDVD, though. One strange thing is that the DVD's at fullscreen now play in a different format, so that there are black rectangles above and below the movie.

Thanks for all input, it seems do have done the system more capable of playing DVD's. There is still something strange going on though.