DVD playback problem

[Patrick]

I bought a couple of Pioneer DVD-rom drives (DVD-117) and I'm having a lot of trouble getting either of them to play DVDs. I'm using WinDVD playback software and I have no trouble playing VCDs, but (rental) DVDs seem to have a problem getting started. Both the picture and the audio are usually distorted when the disk tries to start to play. It's not until I stop the disk from trying to play and then re-start it several times that the distortion sometimes disappears. Both drives exhibit this behavior (in the same Win98SE test computer) and I've tried several different DVD disks. Does this sound like both brand new drives are faulty or is it more likely that this is a software issue?

[Wombat]

Video distortion sounds like a problem somewhere else in the system. Corrupt decoding or something. If the drives aren't making any abnormal noise, they're probably workiing fine.

[Patrick]

Better, but....

Thanks Wombat, I think you're probably right about the drives being Ok. I uninstalled WinDVD and installed PowerDVD XP 4.0 instead. The video portion of the DVDs play back fine now but there's still a warble in the audio. I'll get this figured out yet...

[LvR]

If you have not yet checked - latest update is 4.00.1811.

Perhaps it will help.

[Patrick]

Got it!

Interestingly enough, I discovered that the "warble" in the audio only occurred if the DVD was playing back full screen. When I played the DVD in a smaller window there was no problem. To make a long story short, I changed video cards and now all is well.

I do have to say that I like the PowerDVD XP 4.0 software. Lots of options! Thanks for the tip on the update, Lawrence.

[Gurm]

Patrick - what video card WERE you using? (And which one ARE you using now?)

- Gurm

[Patrick]

Gurm, you want the long version, do you? I was afraid someone would ask.

On a "test" computer running Win98SE, I have it set up with two video display cards. The AGP card is some older nVidia based one (do you need to know which model?), and the PCI one is a Mystique with an attached RRS. I was experimenting with using the video-out capabilities of the RRS while playing DVDs. As you no doubt know, the RRS will output the desktop to a TV, so I was interested in playing back DVDs in full screen mode. That's when I noticed the "warble" in the audio. Not sure why, but as I stated in my last post, if the DVDs played back in a smaller window there was no warble in the audio. When I disabled the Mystique/RRS and used the AGP card for display purposes, the warble disappeared completely. Of course this doesn't do me any good in regards to outputting DVD to TV using the RRS, but I was trying to solve one problem at a time. I've never used a DVD-rom drive or DVD playback software before so I was trying to figure all that out first. Having a warble in the audio was really complicating my research!

[K6-III]

Which soundcard???

[Patrick]

You guys are trying to embarrass me! This computer is an old Dell XPS R400 with onboard Crystal 4236 audio. My other computer is much nicer...