DVD quirks

[Finberg]

This is cut/pasted from my reply on the new matrox forums. Thought I'd post it here too to see if anyone here had some answers.
DVD-Max Fades in and out

When I run a cable out to the tv in my dorm room, dvd-max works great. Sometimes I have to maximize the dvd program to get it the scale correctly onto the tv and sometimes not. I can live with that. However, when I was at home during Christmas, I used dvd-max at my girlfriends house and at my folks's house and at both places I had the brightness fading in and out--quite annoying. At my girlfriends house, I ran it directly into the tv as I do here in my dorm room. However, that resulted in the brightness fading in and out. At my folks's house, I ran it through the VCR and had the same problem. From the above mentioned thread, I see that that is exptected to happen when going through the VCR because of macrovision and AGC, but that doesn't explain why it did that at my girlfriends house. Ideas?

Also, tonight I went to watch the Usual Suspects which I got the day before. I had bumped my fsb up to 142 and set my ram at 3-2-2 the night before to speed up my SETI time. Anyways, when I went to play the dvd, both on my monitor and on the tv, you could see randomly colored pixels on the tv and monitor. Also, the tv displayed a green background during the credits rather than the black background that it is supposed to be. I couldn't figure it out so I restarted and got the same thing. So I restarted again but this time I set my fsb back to 133 and ram back to 2-2-2 (the usual setup) and it ran fine. Any ideas why it would do that?

System:
P!!! 450@600 (was at 640 when I had the pixel problem) at 2.0v
128meg cas2 pc133 at 2-2-2
64meg cas2 pc100 at 2-2-2
Abit BE6-II
G400 Max with Pdesk 5.41 and TurboGL 1.00; Dx7.0
Mx300
Pioneer 10/40x Tray loading.
Win98

[This message has been edited by Finberg (edited 02 March 2000).]

[Damien Green]

It's possible that your girlfriend's TV passes the input signal through some noise filters etc. in order to make the image cleaner. This might fool the macrovision protection into thinking that you're trying to copy the film. There are various programs around I think (you'll have to fo a forum search) that can diable the macrovision protection - thus curing the fading problem.

As for your other problem, all I can say is what do you expect at such a high FSB speed. Unfortunately you've found that your hardware has hit its limits - probably the graphics card and the memory. Remember that as you up the FSB, more often than not, the AGP bus speed is increased with it (unless your bios allows you to clock this and the PCI bus speed individually). I would reccommend that you don't push the FSB up to this frequency again, or you might find yourself with a broken computer.

[Finberg]

I'm not too worried about the agp speed. At 142fsb it's 95mhz. I've heard of g400 max's taking up to 104mhz and mine has withstood months of 103mhz (agp 1/1, fsb 103) back when I had my 300a@464--I didn't understand what the agp divider was so I put it as 1/1 instead of 2/3. However, I probably won't bump it up that high again until I pinpoint the cause of the problem. Thanks for the input on the macrovision problem...I'll have to find one of those macrovision disablers