Flawless DVD Playback on A7M266?

[Guest]

Hello!

I'm having some difficulties with DVD playback on my system. It's a little irritating because everything seems to be working perfectly except for playing DVD's. Many movies will play fine, with short periods of severe "stuttering" (the video freezes, and skips forward slowly). Others are unwatchable because of this skipping. One thing I notice when the skipping occurs... The activity light on the DVD-ROM drive continues to flash, while the IDE activity light in the case goes solid for the duration of the skipping, and then returns to normal flickering during regular playing. I have tried three different DVD drives, and experienced the same problem with each, thus ruling out the DVD drive as the source of the problem. I've tried various versions of drivers, BIOS's, IDE port configurations, etc... and I'm running out of ideas.

Could those of you who's machine's play DVD's perfectly please respond to this message and let me know what sort of hardware configuration you're running? Specificly, I'm really only looking for people with an Asus A7M266 motherboards, as this is the board I'm using. Please include what RAM, video card, sound card, network adapter, additional IDE controlers, Operating System, BIOS Version, DVD Drive, CD-R Drive, etc... Anything that might help me narrow down the source of my problem, and obtain components that will play nice together.

Any input would be greatly apperciated.
Thanks!
Matt


My system is configured as such:

Windows 2000 Professional
Asus A7M266, Bios v1004A
AMD Duron 750 (To be upgraded later)
512MB of Crucial PC2100 DDR-SDRAM (256MB x 2)
Matrox G400 DualHead (with 32MB RAM)
3Com Fast Etherlink XL (3c905B)
AC97 Integrated audio

VIA integrated IDE controler on 686B south bridge
-Primary Master: IBM 15GB ATA/66
-Primary Slave: Zip100
-Secondary Master: I/0 Magic 12X DVD Drive
-Secondary Slave: HP CD-R

SIIG ATA/100 PCI IDE controler (CMD chipset)
-Primary Master: Maxtor 80GB ATA/100

 

[Crashman]

Asus listed a problem with the Via 686B southbridge running a ZIP drive. The even told how to fix it:

"Please install the VIA® Bus Master PCI IDE driver and choose to load Win9x Miniport IDE Driver to fix the incompatible problem".

I would do as they say, then go into programs, find that little VIA DMA enabler and enable DMA. That should fix your problem, but who knows?

Cast not thine pearls before the swine

 

[Guest]

Hello,
Thanks for your suggestion... I installed motherboard drivers before I even started playing around with DVD's. I'm also up to date on all service packs and Windows updates.

I've been through multiple BIOS revs., current VIA drivers, beta VIA drivers... Also I'm running Win2k, not 98. That said, I swapped my main drive for another that I had around the house and did a clean install of Windows 98SE this morning just for kicks to see if it would help. The same problem exists in Windows 98 as does in Windows 2000. Also, I tried disabling the audio hardware and removed the drivers. The problem still exists, so I'm thinking it doesn't have anything to do with the sound hardware.

Anyone else have any suggestions?
Thanks for you input!
Matt

 

[Guest]

One last thing... Since I haven't been watching DVD's... I've been listening to MP3's and CD's. I've noticed that I have similar symptoms with both of these, only much less pronounced (probably because there is considerably less data being moved around and processed). MP3's playing from the hard drive, and CD's playing thrugh digital playback (instead of the CD audio cable) both skip periodicly in the same way the DVD's do.

Just thought that this might be useful information.

Thanks again!
Matt

(I'm getting dangerously close to actually calling Asus tech support and seeing if they'll RMA my board... I hope I don't have to.)

 

[Crashman]

I certainly hopw one of these Win2k/AMD experts steps in and helps, as I don't mess with 2k very often.

Cast not thine pearls before the swine

 

[Guest]

At this point, If someone knows a sure fire way to make my hardware configuration work properly with Windows 98, I might be willing to ditch Win2k. It's important to me to have multimedia work properly on this system. When prices come down in a few months I'm planning to drop in a fast (1.4GHz+) DDR Athlon, add a firewire card and an IBM 60GXP drive to do video editing for my church's youth group.