DVD playback trouble

[dean]

I recently purchased the Marvel G400. I am using an AMD K6-2 366, with 128 mb RAM. Playback is jerky and I don't know why. I have used the ATI All-In-Wonder for DVD playback and that was great. Any help here would be appreciated.
Thank you

[DrMordrid]

Your processor is likely the limiting factor here. The ragged lower edge of DVD playback with the Marvel G400 is ~300 mhz, which is very close to where you are.

I usually recommend at least a 450 mhz. processor to play software DVD back properly. I'm using a Celeron 466/Asus P3B-F and it works great, but given the busmaster and cache problems of the Super7 motherboards you'd likely need a bit more than that.

Dr. Mordrid

[miker]

DVD playback is tricky to get right in software, even when your graphics card helps out (like the ATI). Maybe when we've all got 1GHz, systems we won't have to worry.

My AMD475MHz + TNT2 Ultra couldn't cope with perfect DVD software playback (although XingDVD came close).

Until then get yourself a hardware playback card, I think they're all based on the Hollywood+ chipset and can be had quite cheaply (~£60).

[Emmanuel]

Your K6-2/366 is probably not fast enough to handle correctly the DVD playback. I managed to have a good playback on a Celeron 300A (not overclocked) but it was with PowerDVD. Their minimum hardware requirement are: PII-266, Celeron 300A, K6-2/300 ...
Some software are faster than other and some are optimized for 3Dnow! (check www.dvdutils.com for example). About the ATI, I think they have some hardware DVD supports (Motion compensation?).
And like some have mentionned: don't forget to enable DMA mode on your DVD drive.

[Rick6612]

Hi Dean,

What software are you using to play DVDs? I just got a DVD drive for Christmas, and I've gone through quite an ordeal trying to get it to work well.

After I installed the drive, I tried to install Zoran SoftDVD from my Matrox Marvel G-200 CD-ROM. It wouldn't install. I kept getting an error message about the region code not being set right, or something (more on this problem later in the story).

I got frustrated with Zoran and instead decided to install the PowerDVD v1.6 software that came with the DVD drive. It installed without any problems. However, I noticed that DVD playback wasn't very smooth. I don't know if "jerky" is exactly the right word to describe it... but it is the closest word I can think of.

I tried running Windows System Monitor while playing a DVD and saw that my 400 MHz PII was pegged solid at 100%. I had been thinking about upgrading anyway, so I decided this was my excuse to go buy a new 500 MHz PIII processor for my machine, figuring the 400 MHz PII wasn't fast enough.

After I put in the 500 MHz PIII, playback was slightly improved, but still wasn't right. I ran System Monitor again, and still saw that my processor was pegged solid at 100%!

So, I finally found the web site for the PowerDVD software, and out there I found that they had a free upgrade to v2.0. I installed this upgrade and tried again. Now the video playback was real nice and smooth. System Monitor now showed my CPU at only 70-80% busy during DVD playback! I was much happier for a little while. Then I started noticing that I was seeing a lot more of those "MPEG" artifacts (little blocks) in certain parts of the video.

I have a friend who has a similar system to mine, and he was using Zoran SoftDVD that came with his Marvel, and he claimed he didn't have this problem, so I decided I had to try to get Zoran SoftDVD to work.

I went to Matrox's web site, and looked around at the FAQs for SoftDVD. I finally found the answer - you can't install SoftDVD by running its setup.exe file from the CD-ROM. You must run the Matrox Setup first, and then select SoftDVD from there! Now I've got SoftDVD going and I am pretty happy with it so far. I downloaded and installed the upgrade for SoftDVD they have on the Matrox web site, but so far I haven't really noticed any difference because of it.

Anyway, that's my story, for what it's worth. If you're using PowerDVD v1.6, there is no way it will run with your 366 MHz processor. Even a 500 MHz PIII is not enough for it. If you're running PowerDVD 2.0, or Zoran SoftDVD, then theoretically, you really need about 80% of a 500 MHz PIII (based on my readings from System Monitor) just to get by.

It's another case where they give you "minimum system requirements" which are way too low to actually use the product.

Rick