DVD-ROM Caches Movies to HD???

[Skookie]

I have a Toshiba SD-M1402 DVDRom player. So far, it works just fine. I am running Windows XP. However, when I run a DVD movie, the hard disk is busy the ENTIRE time. The read light on the DVD player does not flash continuously, rather, it flashes once, waits, then flashes, waits, etc. For the most part, I would say it reads large chunks of data, caches to the HD, which spits it out to video.

From what I know about computer DVD players, the DVD stream should be sending all the data to the video card and the sound card. On a test computer at work (P III 600, 128 MB RAM, lo-end video, generic DVD) the hard drive clearly was asleep.

Three software DVD players produced the same results: Windows Media Player, WinDVD, and PowerDVD demo.

The rest of my system:

P3B-F Motherboard
P III 1G proc
256 MB RAM
SB Live
nVidia GeForce2 Ultra

A recent try to watch an entire movie: the movie played for 40 minutes at a time, then would "get stuck." Th movie frame would go still, and the audio would get stuck also, usually a high pitched whine. A hard boot was the only cure.

So my question is: does YOUR DVD player do this? When a movie is on, is your hard drive caching all the data?

If not, do you have a Toshiba? If you do have a Toshiba, did you have any luck getting the DVD player to use the DMA channel? For the record, my system has not assigned a DMA channel to this drive, although after browsing this forum, I have seen that that is not the silver bullet.

uh....HELP!!!!!!

Thanks!

Skooks

 

[Skookie]

Anyone? Anyone?
In short, my question is: does YOUR DVD player do this? When a movie is on, is your hard drive caching all the data? OR is your HD not used when DVD movies are on?

Just a quick yes or no.....please?

Thanks!

S

 

[phsstpok]

Yes.

I get HD activity about once every two seconds.


<b>99% is great, unless you are talking about system stability</b>

 

[4Ryan6]

Increasing your RAM to 512Mb will greatly help your situation and closing all unnecessary programs running in the background thats using some of your available RAM will also help, theres a lot of info transfer done to play a DVD disk, you can be looking at a minimum of 4Gigs from beginning to end of the DVD thats passed through your RAM, if you don't have enough available RAM your swap file will have to be used, if you have a fixed swap file thats not large enough when its needed it will cause a crash, if you have a slow hardrive when the swapfile is required that can cause a problem, theres a lot of factors that affect overall DVD playback performance, and not necessarily your brand of DVDROM drive.




Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.