WinDVD and DVDMax doesn't work

[magick]

Hi. I browsed through the postings and found dozends of references to people using WinDVD with DVDMax. I tried almost every available demo version of WinDVD but can't get it to display anything.
When i start WinDVD it opens a window and displays a macovision warning. After that it plays the FBI warning to the tv when available. Then it resizes the window for the movie and after that i only get a black window.
From the FAQ WinDVD displays only a black screen when there's no macrovision hardware availbale (very clever, a popup dialog would be much to informative). I don't understand this as the g400 definitively has macrovision support and a lot of people use WinDVD with DVDMax. And even when i disable dual head i don't get a picture.
So what am i doing wrong?

[spoogenet]

Although I have no clue which OS/driver version you are using, I'm using Win2k final release with v5.03 of the Matrox Drivers. I'm using WinDVD 1.3.5.

I had similar problems with both 1.3.5 and WinDVD 2000. When I started a movie it would go through the legal stuff then it would being the audio track, however the audio would be messed up and I would not get a picture, or I would continue to see the legal stuff. Using the built-in Win2k DVD front-end it worked just fine, so there was something amok with WinDVD. I had this problem both with and without DualHead enabled.

The Fix? Dunno, used the built-in one for a couple weeks then tried WinDVD again and voila, it worked and has worked since. Funny thing, though, is that when I installed WinDVD it worked the first time I tried it. Later that day, however, it didn't work, and continued to not work for ~2 weeks.

Dunno that this helps, but maybe someone else has experienced similar and has a better fix?

[Brian R.]

Maybe the installation was faulty. If I were in your position, I would delete the WinDVD and the Matrox drivers and reinstall everything, not including the Cinemaster DVD player.