choopy performance while playing DVD

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M

mazyar

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Mar 4, 2001
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I finaly got my card a few days ago, and add it to my PII 400 system. I have 256MB of RAM, SOund blaster live value card, Creative Ovation DVD-ROM, Win2K and 500MB of free space on my OS drive.

I couldn't wait to try my Gladiator DVD. I installed the shipped drivers, then upgraded to all the newest drivers for ATI. I ran DVD4.1 for the ATI and was dismayed to see choppy performance of the movie.

THere were 40 sec stretches where everything ran very smoothly, but then things got choppy to very choppy for 5-10 sec intervals randomly. I have talked to a few people who had slower PC's than me, but had smooth performance and told me that I should be fine. I am missing something here (other than a fast CPU :)

My harddrive light flashes on and off continuesly throughout the movie. As I said, on the drive where my WIN2K resides on, I have about 500 Megs of free space.

Are there any tweeks I can do or any settings to check to see what might be the problem?

Thank you for you advice.
 
F

FatBurger

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Jun 1, 2001
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Ok, that card has DVD decoding built in, if I remember right. Have you seen an option to enable/disable it?

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My Athlon can beat your Ferrari off the line.
 
G

Guest

Guest
This may sound silly, but I just built my new computer and I put a Pioneer 16x dvd in it. When I went to play a dvd it was awful, so "laggy" I couldn't stand it. So I asked around and when I used a different program to watch it on it worked beautifully! I am using PowerDVD to watch them on now, before I was using the ATI program that came with my all-in-wonder radeon. So what program are you using? I would try to maybe use PowerDVD and see if that helps. If you can't use PowerDVD try enabling DMA mode for your dvd player. Power DVD enables it for you, even if your machine (like mine) won't let you. Hope that helps!

<Common Sense is a gift that some of us have returned.>
 
M

mazyar

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Thanks for you responses and suggestions. I did try the DMA enabling, and it worked like a charm. It's great. Thanks.
 
G

Guest

Guest
Hey no problem, I had the same problem with mine. Glad I could help! :smile:

<Common Sense is a gift that some of us have returned.>
 
F

FatBurger

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Jun 1, 2001
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I think I'm one of the few people on this forum with a working DVD drive who doesn't even know if DMA is enabled or not.

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My Athlon can beat your Ferrari off the line.
 
G

Guest

Guest
Well, what software are you using? On my machine I couldn't set the DMA mode on. So I had to use powerDVD which enables the DMA automatically. I would assume there are some other programs that do that as well. I am using Windoze 2000.

<Common Sense is a gift that some of us have returned.>
 
S

Stick_e_Mouse

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yeah, Kmarold_18 took the words out of my mouth.
there is no manual way in win2k that i know of to set dma, the dvd software does it when it is not.

<font color=blue>Your mouse moved. WINDOWS NT must restart for changes to take affect. Restart Now?[OK]</font color=blue>
 
G

Guest

Guest
I tried getting all the latest drivers, and went to my msi's website to see if they knew about it, and I thought they had a fix for it, but it didn't work. So I just used different software. Hey, at least I got it to work! :smile:

<Common Sense is a gift that some of us have returned.>
 
G

Guest

Guest
Actually, there IS a way to set DMA in Windows 2000. If you go into device manager and click on the IDE controllers (Primary or Secondary), there is an option that lets you select DMA or PIO. It should even tell you whether you're using DMA or not as well.

Darth

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This space for lease.
 
S

Stick_e_Mouse

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no wait..
I just came home from work to try out what you just said, and I can't find any option that lets me choose DMA or PIO (although it does tell me its in DMA from the title).

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S

Stick_e_Mouse

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I explored a little bit and found that if you go to
Device Manager>System Devices

There is a "Direct memory access controller" that gives you the option to enable or disable it.

<font color=blue>Your mouse moved. WINDOWS NT must restart for changes to take affect. Restart Now?[OK]</font color=blue>
 
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