WinDVD 5 or PowerDVD 5? (1 Viewer)

[KylePete]

Hi, I am new here, so forgive me if this has been discussed a lot already. I did a search, but did not find anything.

I just bought a PC with a 3.0 GHz P4 Processor. I am using a Radeon 9800 to drive a 23" Apple Cinema display, and I was going to use the system for work I do and watching DVD's etc.

I am currently using PowerDVD 5, but the playback on some DVD's is jittery.....like it's not reading the flags correctly or something. The picture is gorgeous, but motion is not so great on some DVD's.

I was just wondering if someone has any recommendations on software DVD players that have very smooth playback. Is WinDVD 5 better than PowerDVD 5 for smooth playback?

I greatly appreciate any help/suggestions.

Kyle

 

[Patrick Sun]

Do you have the DMA enabled for the DVD-ROM drive being used to play the DVDs? (Check the Device Manager)

 

[Craig Woodhall]

also, check to make sure the sound setting are right. when i was sending my sound out to my Lexicon, i had the SPDIF set to decode DD and it was choppy until i set it to passthrough mode.

 

[KylePete]

Thanks, guys.

Patrick, I do have DMA enabled on the DVD-Rom drive.

Craig, I am actually letting PowerDVD do the DD decoding.

I've tried everything that I know....updating drivers, changing all the configurations within PowerDVD, DD 5.1, DD 2.0, etc.

One note....the theatrical version of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is very jerky, at timed intervals. However, the Extended Edition is silky smooth (because of higher bitrate?)....except that playback freezes for a few seconds every 20 minutes or so.

It seems that no two movies I've played have the same video problems....they're all different.

I am at a loss. I thought a machine with a 3.0 GHz processor wouldn't have any playback problems.

Has anyone else run into such problems before?

Thanks again for the help. I really do appreciate it.

Kyle

 

[Chris]

Kyle-

Cyberlink has an update at their website for PowerDVD5, which is what I use as well.. you might go and get it and see: http://www.gocyberlink.com/

You can also get it here: http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail.php3?fid=997463741

Released 12/26/03, so very new

 

[Patrick Sun]

Also, did the ATI 9800 come with its own software DVD player on its Catalyst installation CD? My ATI 9600 video card did, and I use it sometimes to play DVD, and don't mess with having to load up yet another DVD player on the PC.

 

[Chris]

except for one thing: PowerDVD and others will decode DTS, etc. and use 6 channel output; the software that comes with ATI won't do that.

 

[KylePete]

Thanks for the help, Chris and Patrick.

Chris, I did not realize Cyberlink came out with another update already. I will try it out today.

Patrick, Chris is right....I would really like to have DTS and a lot of the other great things that come with PowerDVD or WinDVD.

Thanks again for the help. It is always greatly appreciated.

Kyle

 

[KylePete]

Chris, that patch update that you mentioned is no longer on Cyberlink's website. On the second link you posted, someone said that it was taken down for no apparent reason.

Maybe it caused more problems than it solved?


Thanks again,
Kyle

 

[Chris]

For people who had GeforceFX5700/5900 cards, it rendered serious system problems.

 

[Patrick Sun]

How about the DMA enabled for your hard drive(s)?

 

[Robert_Gaither]

Try going into your bios and turn on the allow DMA options, then try turning this on for the IDE controller, HD, and DVD rom. The last and not least, while the player is in the stop mode, go under the properties/settings and enable video hardware acceleration.

 

[KylePete]

Thanks again for the help.

Chris, thanks for the info concerning the GFX cards.

Patrick, DMA is enabled on all hard drives.

Robert, are you saying that I should turn off DMA on all my storage devices and then turn them back on? And video hardware acceleration is turned on and was turned on when no DVD was in the DVD-ROM.

I am really stumped. Could it be that I am just noticing motion artifacts, etc. that are inherent to the actual DVD? This type of jittering happens with most DVD's, but not all of them.

I really appreciate all the help that has been offered.

Thanks,
Kyle

 

[Robert_Gaither]

Most software dvd decoder (win, power, etc) require that the DVD is in the stop mode to allow video hardware acceleration to be turned on, sorry I wasn't clearer on this. Sounds to me that the only two culprits could be that either you're not running enough memory or under the bios settings you might have to turn on the "allow DMA" option. What brand of board/computer do you have?

 

[Patrick Sun]

I realize you want to keep the 5.1 audio output option, but have you at least tried watching a DVD using the ATI DVD player to rule out your hardware settings being the culprit?

Or have you tried watching it using Window Media Player? I think Version 9 will allow you to watch DVDs.

I've seen some poor freeware DVD players that will introduce the slow-ups during playback at timed intervals as well.

My Compaq laptop came with WinDVD, and it plays DVDs fine, without any jerky video playback if all it's doing is playing the DVD.

Another thing to try is to open up Task Manager and keep an eye for when the CPU utilization spikes up when the video gets a bit jerky, and see if another process is periodically polling the system, thus causing the slight slowdown on the DVD playback.

 

[Tony Loewen]

Hey KylePete, how goes it?

Welcome to the forum. I have one quick question for you. You had mentioned that the video was jerky at timed intervals with LOTRs. Is this a fairly common problem with the movies you are watching? Also, are these movies retail DVD's or backup copies? I have made quite a few backups from my collection, and especially when format conversion is involved, if you don't know what you are doing with framerates, especially when NTSC and NTSC FILM are involved, it's pretty easy to get jerky video playback. I ruined a few discs before figuring it out. "dvdrhelp.com" has some good help about it.
If these are retail dvd's then I can't offer any help.

Hope you get things working!

Tony

 

[KylePete]

Thanks for the replies, Robert, Patrick, and Tony.

Robert, the "Allow DMA" option is checked in the BIOS. I am running an ASUS P4C800-E motherboard with 1 Gig of RAM. I do a lot of work in Adobe After Effects, Premiere, Encore DVD, etc., and all those apps run smooth as silk. I am almost positive it has to be the DVD software.

This PC was built by Falcon Northwest (it was spendy, but I wanted to get a PC that wouldn't give me headaches....whoops).

Patrick, unfortunately, the ATI DVD player was never installed on this system, and was not included in the package. The Falcon Northwest system cannot be hooked up to the internet at its current location. I actually cut holes in a wall to put the computer in a separate room and isolate system noise for recording purposes, so transporting the system to another location would require necessity. And the 450 MHz system I am currently typing on is 15 miles away and doesn't have a CD burner.

And I've watched the CPU utilization during playback, and it never goes above 3%.

Tony,I am actually using retail DVD's....which is what makes this so annoying.

This system is near perfect for me. The image quality (except the jerkiness) of the DVD's on this system and monitor is absolutely breath-taking...I'll try to post some pictures if anyone is interested.

As always.....many, many thanks for all the help and effort that has been given. This system has put me into debt, so making the DVD playback work is really important to me. I really appreciate the help.

This really is a great forum.

Kyle

 

[Chris]

Ok, yeah, you won't have the ATI DVD Player because Falcon doesn't use an ATI ATI 9800 card, I believe they are using the card by Saphire. (Saphire is one of many companies who also builds cards with ATI Chips) but it doesn't come with the ATI DVD software.

HOWEVER, the board you are using and configuration are a big tip off. In XP, DMA is always on if it's on in BIOS, so you're OK there, you need to make sure you have the new BIOS for the P4C800-E board. You want the V1014 BIOS

Asus Link

If you have Intel Application Accelerator 2.3 Drivers installed AND a SATA hard drive, Immediately get this patch:

Microsoft Link

Due to the way Intel's drivers tend to work, you can occassionally get a CRC error in the stream, and due to a cough in MS's method, after six, it permanently lowers transfer modes (talk about SUCK) This fixes that.

Let me know how it goes, and if you are using SATA, there are a few other suggestions I've got

 

[KylePete]

Chris, thanks for the help. How did you know Falcon uses Sapphire cards?

Thanks for the link to the new BIOS. I'll have to try that out today.

I actually am using SATA drives. Is it only with version 2.3 of the Intel drivers that the error occurs? I was totally unaware of this problem. I will definitely try this out today, too.

Thanks again for the help, Chris. I am always grateful.

Kyle

 

[Chris]

Eh, I work in the computer industry, we keep pretty up to speed (I work at a distributor, sometimes in the "For Sale" area I put out crap we can't sale or that gets sold to employees)

Anyway, since you're using SATA drives, make sure that SATA compatibility Mode is OFF and switched to NATIVE within the BIOS. If it's on, you're always going to get strange stutters.

I forgot to ask, but make sure you're running the newest ATI software, http://www.atitech.ca/

But, really, try the Microsoft patch after the BIOS, especially if SATA. Then, uninstall Intel Application Accelerator as a last step; if you're not running SATA in a RAID0, you're getting very little benefits.