DVD playing issues...

[PrimaryTech]

Hi all,

It's that time of year again when staff want to start playing DVD's to the class and I've got a bit of an issue with a few of our PC's. The PC's in question are P4 1.8GHz units with 512mb Ram and plenty of HDD space free.

 

However, when playing DVD's the CPU usage is always between 90 and 100% causing the DVDs to skip. So far I've tried PowerDVD 6, VLC and Media Player Classic but they all do the same.

 

I've also stopped the antivirus whilst playing DVD's but get the same problem.

 

Is the problem that my hardware is not fast enough? Could anyone recommend a resource-light DVD player instead of the aforementioned? Anything else i can try to make the DVDs run smoothly?

[Guest TheLibrarian]

It's more to do with the CPU having to decode the DVD rather than the video card.

 

Unfortunately I've never found anything to get round this.

[Mako]

Hi,

 

This may or may not be relevant but some of our machines have a habit of, when playing DVDs, running the player twice in the background - specifically with PowerDVD. We get reports of jumpy or jerky DVD playback, and when we look at TaskManager the PowerDVD .exe process is running twice, which causes processor usage to shoot up to 100%. We kill one of them and play the DVD again, and it runs fine. Perhaps something to check - order processes by their CPU usage and see if you're having a similar issue.

 

Does it happen with all specified machines or just one or two?

 

If it was all machines, and they're of the same spec, then you could look at inadequate hardware, but if some are okay and some are not then it's another issue.

 

Also consider updating your codecs - K-Lite Mega Codec Pack

 

I would have thought that a P4 with half a gig of ram should be capable of running a DVD

[mac_shinobi]

Try videolan and see if its any different with regards to cpu usage etc

 

VLC media player - Open Source Multimedia Framework and Player

 

Obviously there are some legalities with using vlc but there is also windows media player classic that can playback dvd's but not sure on legalities of using that either.

 

You could keep power dvd installed and just use one of the above players and that way it has a legal dvd decoder on the computer

[mrwobbly]

Go to device manager and open up the IDE controllers. Open up the secondary IDE controller and go to the advanced settings. I bet you will find they are running in PIO mode. Change to DMA mode. End of stutter. I’ve seen this so many times.

 

If the DMA mode is not available the chipset drivers will need re-installing or were never installed in the first place.

[CallMeFred]

@mac_shinobi

I've got to ask - what are the legal concerns of using VLC?

[stevenlong1985]

£20 cheap DVD player, that what I have

[TechSupp]

Had this myself aswell, to things to check, as mentioned previously the DMA setting of the DVD drive and also open up the PC and check how the drive is connected to the motherboard, try and make sure its set as master on its own channel, that was my problem, they had been built for cheapness using a single cable and the DVD set as slave on the same channel as the hard disk! Added a new cable and set it as Master, end of problems.