DVD won't play

March 4, 2005 4:54 PM

I just added a new DVD-Rom drive on my PC. Popped in a DVD film and it can play, but the images are jumpy, halting, and not really viewable.

I finally got a DVD (nnd CD writer ) combo drive - an LG GCC-452/bb - my first. Hey- I live in the boonies. The guy at the shop told me I wouldn't need any special software, that my Nero prohgram would recognize it immediately.

Installed, it, and the PC then told me I needed a decoder. downloaded several DVD decoders before finding one that one worked at all - the Cyberlink PowerDVD 30 day trial version. But the quality is still pretty bad - jumpy, stop-and-go quality, not fluid.

Any suggestions? I've been googling all day with no success, and already searched AskMe archives... I've never had a DVD drive to deal with before, so I am probably missing something extremely obvious (hmmm... it IS plugged in!) Could it be that my media card is old?

posted by zaelic to computers & internet (14 comments total)

try VLC player. It should have the ability to play the dvd - it's free to. At least I think It'll work.
posted by filmgeek at 5:08 PM on March 4, 2005

VLC Client - yeah it says it plays dvds
posted by filmgeek at 5:11 PM on March 4, 2005

Poor DVD playback is often caused by hardware that can't keep up with the DVD datastream.
What are your hardware specs?
posted by quiet at 5:15 PM on March 4, 2005

Quiet: Pentium II processor, 256 Ram, it's a pretty peppy machine, although I have doubts about the sound card being up to date...
posted by zaelic at 5:49 PM on March 4, 2005

I would guess you need at least a PII400 to playback a DVD with no assistance from the video card. Certainly a PII266 is probably not good enough.

Also, DMA may be disabled on your DVD drive, you should be able to turn it on in device manager.
posted by Chuckles at 6:09 PM on March 4, 2005

Yes, I enabled DMA...
posted by zaelic at 6:10 PM on March 4, 2005

I would recommend getting away from cyberlink too, at least for now. Install the k-lite mega codec pack. Not only does this install Media Player Classic with DVD support, it also eliminates the need for Quicktime and Realaudio and you will never have to play with codecs again. (Some people say you have to limit the number of codecs installed by unchecking rarely used ones, I have never had any trouble with the full suite)

Other than that, I think we need to know your video card and CPU to tell you more. Try running aida32 if you don't know this information. It doesn't require an install, and it should be pretty straight forward.
posted by Chuckles at 6:29 PM on March 4, 2005

If you are comfortable with messing around with the settings on a computer, you might try increasing the priority for the DVD player. You can do this by the following steps (after starting the DVD player):

1. Run Windows Task Manager. There are a variety of ways to do this. I usually just right-click the Taskbar and then select Task Manager.

2. Select the Processes tab.

3. Find the DVD player on the list of processes. It will likely be the same name as the executable that you used to run the DVD player. It should have DVD (or VLC, if that's what you're using) in the name.

4. Right-click on the process and then choose Select Priority to get the priority submenu.

5. Pick AboveNormal on the submenu. This should give the DVD player a little more priority when it comes to playing the DVD without causing problems with those system processes that need to have more priority (since those usually run at High priority).

Hopefully, that will help. Also, besides the processor speed, it might be your graphics card that's causing the problem. Make sure you update to the latest drivers. Let us know what video card you have if you want someone to let you know if it's good enough. It's doubtful your sound card is the issue. Good luck.
posted by EatenByAGrue at 6:32 PM on March 4, 2005

I've had dvd playback problems with my laptop and xp. When a certain number of disk read problems happen, xp slows down the reading rate. I think you go to Control panel>system>hardware>device manager>IDE ATA/Atapi controllers (not the drive like you would think)>primary (or secondary, depending on which IDE your DVD is on)>advanced settings. Then look to see what the transfer mode is. I think DMA 5 is the fastest, then DMA 4 on down and PIO is the slowest. If it is stuck in PIO then you may have to uninstall/reinstall or change the registry (google for instructions).
posted by 445supermag at 7:34 PM on March 4, 2005

DVDs store the data in YUV colour format. If your graphics card and drivers will take YUV then the CPU does little more than shunt the bits around, but if not, and many older ones don't, then the CPU has to convert it all to RGB which anecdotally requires a minimum of a 800Mhz processor, preferably 1Ghz.

(I've been looking at building a barebones machine to act as a media center, so I've been reading a bit on this recently.)
posted by quiet at 3:58 AM on March 5, 2005

OK, I got SysSpec to tell me about the computer (it is actually my girlfriend's...)
Pentium II, CPU 1001.9 MHz
512 MB Memory
NVidiaRiva TNT2 Model 64 video card

A google on the video card shows that it is a cheapie, and since this computer was an inherited office machine, it may be so: "What gives, in this case, is the NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Model 64 chipset, with a honking 32 megabytes of video memory. The Model 64 is a cut-down version of the full TNT2; it retains the TNT2's 128 bit data interface, but has only a 64 bit memory interface. In English, this means the Model 64 is notably slower for 3D than the "real" TNT2, but retains outrageous 2D performance - high speeds and high refresh rates at resolutions higher than 1600 by 1200 and high colour depths are easy for the Model 64, although these resolutions are of little use on monitors with a diagonal of less than 21 inches."

Can the video card be the culprit?
posted by zaelic at 5:57 AM on March 5, 2005

It is very strange that it detects as a PII 1GHz, that doesn't exist. It could be a PIII 1GHz though. It is a pretty fast processor, relative to DVD playback anyway...

The key question for the video card is weather it does DVD acceleration, like inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT), and some other features. I think your card is probably okay for that, but I don't have time to look it up now, maybe in a few hours.

I think you must have a software/configuration problem of some sort...
posted by Chuckles at 9:08 AM on March 5, 2005

It might be worth experimenting with changing your color depth/display resolution/refresh rate to see if that helps matters at all.

Also, it's a combo drive so I guess it's running as master and not sharing the IDE channel with anything else (like a second CD-ROM)? I ask because I had problems with my DVD player and CD-writer not working together including choppy DVD playback which were solved by replacing them both with a combo drive. This was on a 1.4Ghz Athlon with GeForce2 MX.
posted by teleskiving at 11:12 AM on March 5, 2005

Looks like the video card doesn't really have hardware DVD acceleration. Still, your hardware should be more than adequate. Here is a very ATI centric synopsis from of hardware DVD acceleration features from a review. The TNT2 does not have motion compensation or iDCT, but it does do alpha blending.

teleskiving has a very good point though, make sure the DVD is the only drive on it's IDE channel!
posted by Chuckles at 11:43 AM on March 5, 2005