Is this DVD ???

[Deef]

I'm experiencing something very strange when playing dvd's via my g400.
approx. 2x times a second: blinking, sudden blockiness and color banding, especially noticable in dark scenes with non moving backgrounds with a lot of greys. I have this problem with every software player (cinemaster, windvd2000, powerdvd) I've tried every setting I'm using dvdgenie 3.24.
It can't have anything to do with pal/nstc because I've tried both.
I've even removed my hp8100 cdwriter installed on second ide slave. To no effect.
The strange thing is it happens at a certain pace (2x s.) in scenes where there is infact not that much to update. It should not be a performance problem.
I still enjoy watching a dvd by the computer, at first I didn't even notice, but once I had noticed it, it's really buggin' me.

Because I didn't have any problems with my g400 sofar and because with certain dvd's it's more noticable then with others, I'm beginning to doubt if this isn't a common dvd-problem. Can somebody please help me. tell me if you also noticed this problem.

Sure hope I gan get rid of this problem. I really like my g400 setup and I would hate having to buy a harware decoder-card.

my config:
PIII 450, 128 sdram, g400 MDH4A32G, sblive1024, prim ide: maxtor 7,5Gb 7200, fireball 6,3Gb, sec ide: toshiba 6xdvd, hp8100.
win 98
liveware 3.0
pd 5.41

[Minder]

Same here!

But I think it doesn't have to do anything with the utiltity you mention. If I remember correctly, I first noticed the blinking when I connected my TV (bigger screen - more obvious blinking).

It would be really nice to know if this is a general problem of software dvd players (maybe some data reduction to save computation power).

[DrMordrid]

1. go into Device Manager and make sure DMA is checked off for your DVD and whatever other devices are on it's IDE cable.

2. make sure you have at least a 250-300 meg swapfile.

Dr. Mordrid

[Minder]

No, this is not a problem of performance.

The blinking goes on in the 8x8 pixel mpeg coded squares. The decoders seems to lose track of the interpolated frames and everytime a full frame comes along in the stream it updates -> blink.

You can only notice it in areas where nothing happens and the color of that area is mostly uniform (e.g. someone stands before a grey wall).

I've noticed that the matrox dvd player exhibits this more that the PowerDVD player.

[Deef]

Thank you
Okay! So I'm not the only one, noticing it. You'll probably notice it sooner on a bigger screen (41" TV in my case, it sometimes is really crappy) On my computer monitor it's not that obvious, but still noticable.
As I said it's more obvious with some movies and only in particular scenes. I can live with it, I think. But it's a bit of a disappointment. The picture is of such good quality the rest of the movie. Do you think this is something they're still working on or is it something we have to live with?
I mean I also used windvd200 en powerdvd 2.5 and to me, they were all showing this blinking/updating and i couldn't notice any difference with the somewhat older cinemaster supplied with the g400.
Are these artifacts gone when I use a home-dvd-player or a hardware decoder card?