Jerky DVDplayback

[Smurfen]

Hi

My system is very bad at playing DVDmovies.
My system consist of the following components.

Abit BX6 2.0
2x Hyundai 128Mb ECC Sdram
G400 Max
Pentium III 500 overclocked to 585
Tekram DC 390U
Jetway internal PCI 56,6 modem
Soundblaster AWE 64
3Com 509B
Quantum Fireball 6,4GB SCSI
Mitsumi 8x/4x CD-R
Hitachi DVD 2500 4X

The DVD playback is jerky at sometimes mainly at zooming and at panning, what can this depend on, a couple of friends says that the DVD may be faulty cause when I use DMA the playback is even more jerky than without DMA.
Please help me.

Cheers

------------------
//Smurfen

[Le Bodge]

Have you downloaded DVD Genie (formally Region Selector) from http://www.inmatrix.com/files/dvdgenie_download.html ? This allows you to change far more settings than the standard control panel.

Are you using the standard DVD player that comes on the Matrox Install CD?

Have you updated it with any later cinemaster files?

What region code DVD's have you noticed it on?

Do you run any other applications at the same time?

Are running Win 98?

Are you viewing them on your monitor or a TV?

DVD's normally play fine on my G400 MAX / PII 450 Win 98 systems at 1024 x 768.

[Tessen]

Other questions I would ask are:

Does the Max perform well in a 3D environment? If not, you *may* have a driver issue -- I needed an AGP driver update for my Asus.

Does the Max have an IRQ all to its own (it should)?

....Tessen....

I run mine through the TV via the S-video cable and as long as I don't have anything else running (and don't minimize the playback window on the monitor), DVD's run very well. And that's on a P3-450 with 128 MB RAM and Windows 98 SE.

[George]

Smurfen,

The DVD player that comes with the Matrox G400 is very good but there are a few issues that you need to be aware of. If you are playing Region 1 movies with the video output of DVDMax set to PAL, every 1 second you will see a frame drop (quite marked). The easy fix for this is to switch the output to NTSC, that is of course if your TV supports it. The other fix would be to use DVDGenie as suggested by LeBodge and change the Surface Flip Mode to Soft De-interlace. However, since you mention that you can see jerky movement, this would not be a good option as this option is more likely to cause the problems you are seeing.
Although it is quite hard to believe, I have found that overclocking has a negative effect on the quality of the DVD playback. I would suggest you try and drop your current FSB of 117mHz back down to the default 100mHz and see what happens.
If you don't see any improvements kill all running processes (what do your system resources look like before you start?).

Quite a lot of things to be checking on, but if you could possibly feedback to us what version of the DVDplayer you are using.

As a last aside, what movies are you playing? Are they all dual layer? Some drives don't handle these very well.

Cheers,

George.

[adamhamilton]

I see you have a 3COM NIC installed.
I have had a lot of problems caused by the 3COM diagnostic utility, and have heard of it disrupting DVD decoding.

Uninstall this (your network with still work fine) and it may fix your problem - let me know if it does!