DVD Green Flickering/Ghosting with Matrox G400 Marvel & DVD program

[VTS69]

Hi

This weekend I've been trying to get the DVD player to work (G400 Marvel). The stills screens on the DVDs show perfectly.

But when I try to play the actual film it suffers from a flickering greeny ghosting effect on the TV and in the window on the monitor it shows fine if the window is made very small, goes green/black at a medium window size and and the same greeny ghosting flicker at full screen as appears on the TV.

I've downloaded the latest drivers from the site and installed them, I tried deselecting the dual head but the image on the monitor does not improve. I prefer 1280x1078 but I've tried the recommended 16 bit 1076x768 resolution and also tried 800x600 in case it was the hardware being slow.

I've only got 3 DVDs as yet and it happens on all of them.

My PC is a NEC Athlon 1.3 gig with AMD 760 chipset, 256MB DDram, 60Gb hard disk, Pioneer 115 DVD drive, Windows ME. 4 months old.

It came with an Nvidia Geforce GT graphics card and MGI SoftDVD pre-installed. The DVDs played OK both on the monitor window and the TV (but not dual head so couldn't do both at the same time!).

So I have replaced that with the Matrox card which I'd bought for my previous Dell system - this didn't have a DVD player so I never tried on that machine.

When I run SoftDVD with the Matrox card, I get one of two error messages on loading the DVD, either "Video Renderer error" or "error in ZDVD.DLL".

So it's not the program or the TV connections but the drivers I think. But I have installed the latest VT 1.55 and 6.28 and games etc work OK on it...

Anyone had this? And know what the answer is?

Thanks

VTS

BTW I would post on the Matrox tech support forum but you can't at the weekend - grrr just the time when you're trying to do stuff

[Maggi]

first off, Welcome aboard !



Does your problem also occur if you use the Cinemaster DVD Player ?

[VTS69]

Guten Tag, Maggi

I only have the MGI Soft DVD player that came with the PC and the Matrox DVDMAX that came with the Marvel... Is this the Cinemaster you mean?

In which case the problem does occur with it - the other player won't even play at all :-(

Cheers

VTS

[Maggi]

Hi VTS,

confuzing ...

The DVD Player that came with your Matrox card should be the one from Cinemaster.
DVD Max is a certain video overlay function, that Matrox Dualhead cards offer for viewing video clips in fullscreen on your TV (respectively 2nd monitor), so I have no idea whether you're really running the Cinemaster player.

Also, it would be quite helpful, if you'd provide as much system details as possible, ie. list of IRQs, chipset drivers etc.

Please, also post your DVD Max configuration.

Cheers,
Maggi

[VTS69]

Hi Maggi,

Thanks for your assistance, nice one. Your post reminded me of a possible cause I'd overlooked and you were right. But I'm still confused as to how to solve it!

Last night I went through the process of updating the AMD chipset BIOS, uninstalling and reinstalling all the drivers but this didn't help.

Then I looked at the IRQ situation and it became clear - IRQ10 was being shared by the Marvel and my Echo Mona soundcard, as well as some IRQ steering. Disabling the soundcard in the system properties meant the picture was fine on the monitor and on the TV. Yay!!!

Only without sound of course.

I don't know if it's a Windows ME thing but I can't change IRQ values for anything - it says I'm not allowed. I tried disabling IRQ steering but this still wouldn't let me change IRQs, I also reserved IRQ10 in the BIOS to force Windows to reconsider where to assign IRQs but this only made the PC not boot into windows at all...

Do you or anyone else know how to reassign IRQs in Windows ME???

Thanks in advance

VTS



BTW You're right I was confusing DVD Max with the bundled DVD player which is the ravisent cinemaster one - sorry!

[Maggi]

there should be an option in your MoBo's BIOS to assign an IRQ for each slot and make sure you set "PnP OS installed" to "No".

Thus the OS (normally) won't be allowed to override the assignments made in your BIOS.

[VTS69]

Hi

Well I moved the soundcard from one slot to another and the mobo gave it a different IRQ so now everything is on different IRQs.

But the green flickering/ghosting still happened. Again disabling the Echo Mona soundcard made it work OK.

Then I tried disabling my other Yamaha soundcard instead and found that the picture was fine too.

So the problem is not incompatibility with the soundcard and the Marvel but appears to be something to do with having 2 soundcards running at the same time...

(this is not a problem outside of DVD playing - indeed the reason I have 2 soundcards is 'cos I do a lot of music stuff in cubase where I am using both cards in sync at the same time!!!)

So I have a solution now which is to disable the soundcard I don't use for DVD sound when playing DVDs so everything's cool.

Thanks for your assistance,

Cheers

VTS