DVD drive problem? (1 Viewer)

[Neil Joseph]

I have an NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Model 64 Pro, and just loaded the latest drivers for Win XP. I have hardware acceleration enabled.

 

[Max Leung]

Hmm, you just might get better performance if you disable hardware acceleration. I believe the newer software DVD players have better video quality than the TNT2 and Geforce 256 cards.

That TNT2 is rather long-in-the-tooth. Try replacing it with a Geforce2 MX or better?

 

[Dome Vongvises]

I'm starting to have problems as well. I'll try some of the suggestions in this thread.

 

[Robert_Gaither]

I'll make a few suggestions, under SystemHardwareDevice managerSystem Devices there might be one of two things here either "PCI to PCI bridge" (this is wrong if your video is AGP) or "(chipset brand) AGP to CPU controller" (this should be correct if your computer's built-in card or your video card uses an AGP bus) this can easily be fixed with a driver upgrade. The next suggestion I'll make is to state what type of memory chip you're using (if it's the Kingston Value Ram, this might be the problem) or if it's two chips of different brands to unseat and move them from one slot to another (worse comes to worse see if you can trade memory with a friend for troubleshooting purposes). The other option is to maybe change to a different brand of DVD software decoding (I changed from WINDVD2000 to PowerDVD and it was much better and easier for my system to handle). Also did you recently added any software or hardware recently? You also never stated whether you play exclusively in software mode or use the video mode hardware support.

 

[Neil Joseph]

You also never stated whether you play exclusively in software mode or use the video mode hardware support.

I pop the DVD in and use one of either Mediamatics DVD, PowerDVD, or Interactual DVD players. Can you explain more about video mode hardware support?

 

[Ken Chan]

PowerDVD will take advantage of MPEG decoding hardware that some video cards (like Radeon and probably GeForce) have. The CPU utilization will go down quite a bit, maybe 50% or more. You do sacrifice a few features, like thumbnails.

In PowerDVD, I believe it's on the Video page of the Configuration dialog. The other players may have a similar option.

//Ken

 

[DaveGTP]

I had a lot of problems with NAV 2001 making my system (Athlon 750, Original Radeon) getting choppy after an hour or 2. I was on the verge of buying new hardware. I found that I had to not only disable it, but totally kill NAV from system tray. Before you rule out NAV, make sure it is turned OFF, and not just disabled (I think it was leaking memory).

 

[Dome Vongvises]

Here's the problem I'm having. I'm using Interactual Player. The disc plays fine at first, but for some reason, the disc will slow down. Audio plays fine, but the DVD video playback is horrible. Why does my disc drive quit spinning fast to make up for this?

 

[Robert_Gaither]

Most likely the Interactual player is also building up a spyware file to send back to the manufacturer any info they deem appropriate to have (they might check some of the other sites on you as well). Most DVD's that claim you must install the Interactual software to play them are wrong (just close it down, and open your player and hit play) and personal I don't use it because I have seen it actually eat about 10-15% more processor which I consider unacceptable.

Thanks Ken for explaining to Neil what the Video mode hardware support is and how to implement it. I know on my computer (a fully integrated board with a P3 900mhz and 1G of ram) I was consistantly hitting high 90s on the processor until I enabled it for hardware support and it dropped to a consistant under 45%.

 

[Neil Joseph]

Disabling NAV was something I did early on. Anyway, the hardware acceleration on PowerDVD helped to fix my problem. This was indeed a very educational thread as someone else already mentioned.

 

[Neil Joseph]

Just an update...

I recently had to replace my DVD drive for mechanical reasons so the new drive, being newer, is faster and more up to date. Anyway, when I tried to play DVD's on it, it was dreadfully slow, even worse than before, stopping and starting the video constantly, and sometimes so slow that the image was black (ie a blank screen). I checked the control panel hardware settings and all looked ok. I then checked the Power DVD configuration. Hardware acceleration was enabled (checked) so I disabled it and voila, the drive worked flawlessly, very smooth, and no problems with any disks. I then re-enabled HW acceleration and it was slower than molasses.

Not sure why this would happen but I thought I would update this thread for anyone else having DVD playback problems on their PC's. Lots of good tips throughout this thread.