What's a good DVD Drive for G400DH32 and Sblive?

[oober goober]

I have no idea here. I'm about to fling my 40xCD and purchase a DVD, but I know very little about these things as yet. I know a drive and decoder card are the way to go, but what's a good part for the above combo? Are there any possible pitfalls. I presume a Creative Encore 5x or 6x would be a good call?
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Jas

[CrazyBee]

BAH!! Decoder cards.. BAH!!!

I'd stay away from them since teh video pass through degraded my video quality and made it look like an OEM TNT... ugh..

Any ways.. I have a G400 32MB DH and, SB Live! 1024, and a Pioneer DVD-104 (the slot loading one!) and my stuff is SCWEET!!

minus the unrelated boot problem i had before

So far, from what ihave seen in decoder cards, the G400 TV out and on screen display, is way better than a DxR2 or DxR3, but, that just might be some internal bias of mine or that they have crappier hardware than I do overall.

Aside from having to reboot to use TV-out its not that much of a problem. Also, with PowerDVD 2.55 the SB Live! can do BOTH Dolby Digital and DTS pass-through.

CB

[BananaMan]

I too have a g400 32mb dh, sb live (value) and Pioneer dvd-104, which is far better than the creative 48x cd that i had before. It installed perfectly well but when I re-installed w98, which I needed to do anyway, I couldn't see the dvd in explorer. After much fretting and re-installation, I finally got access to it. When I then installed the sb live drivers it disappeared from explorer as the sb16 emulation was being installed. When I went to device manager and disabled the sb16 emulation, the dvd magically re-appeared in explorer.

The outcome is that I now have a fully working dvd drive on which to watch films and all for the price of £70, which beats the £250 odd I would have had to pay for a dvd player for my tv.

[Alf]

I've been using my Toshiba SD-M1212 DVD drive for some time now and had no problems.

Got a G400 Max and a P3/600 with 192MB and no decoder. Playback is smooth but not as good when compared to hifi players. The colourbalance and contrast always seem to be a bit of track.

live forever,

Tomi

[Maggi]

I use the Pioneer S303 on my G400 32MB DH and Celeron333A@500 ...

Creamy ... not need for a decoder !



------------------
Cheers,
Maggi

Despite my nickname causing confusion, I am not female ...

[CrazyBee]

BananaMan.. are you using Win98 or Win98SE?

just wondering..

Any ways, I had the same disppearing drive thing. Except it was with my USB drive. Happened after I installed my DVD drive. Went away! I reinstalled win98se with no help. Then, prompted by other problems withmy comp. I deleted the windows dircetory and reinstalled Win98SE, defragmented, and now my stuff is flying!

CB

[BananaMan]

Crazybee...

I have w98, not w98se.

I have to say that I am really pleased with the quality and the slot loading is great. My only niggle is that it doesnt have a remote control so i have to get up and press some keys on the keyboard but thats just me being lazy.