5920g Hd Dvd

I just got my 5920G used off e-bay and overall I am very pleased with this laptop. Unfortunately, however, I am having terrible issues with the HD DVD drive; I cannot tell if its software or hardware related. When i put the HD DVD in the drive it'll read and recognize the disc, but when I hit "play" in the acer arcade it says "A critical component of the player requires periodic update. New movies could fail to play if the component is not updated promptly. Would you like to update now" I hit yes and nothing happens. When I try to play the HD DVD again it will either bring up that message again, do nothing, or lock up. I have no real consistency with it, and actually one time I actually had the HD DVD play but with static appearing in the image every few seconds. This is with the "300" HD DVD. Anyone else have similiar issues with their drive or when playing back discs? Thanks for any help you can give.

 

UPDATE: I managed to crawl through the forums and find some answers to some of my questions. Turns out there is many more threads about the 5920g then the search engine on this website is able to turn up. But I digress...

I updated the firmware on my HD DVD drive so it managed to play the HD DVD almost everytime, however it still managed to pull static every few seconds throughout the video, rendering playblack useless. I assumed this to be an issue with the video card drivers, so I updated to the 169.09 nvidia drivers using the modded INF file. Now I have a new error message when attempting playback; it says something along the lines of I need to either 1) enable windows aero (which it always has been) or 2) turn off screen capture since my vga card allows this (due to copy protection? you've got to be kidding me...). It seems like in an endless circle where I'm constantly jumping through hoops only to fix one problem and create another... is HD DVD playback actually possible with the Acer Arcade, has anyone actually done this? If so, do you have any suggestions? Thanks.

 

I've actually gotten it to work in the past although currently I am having the same problem you are depending on which disk I put in. One disc says there is an update and then it does nothing, and another disk says I have enabled Aero's color scheme and/or turn off the video capture.

I have no idea what's going either, sorry I can't help but I do share in your frustration.

Edit:
I kind of know what's going on but no clue how to fix it at the moment. When I used to watch HD DVD's windows would change the color scheme first automatically and then play the movie. It's no longer doing that, hence the problem. I thought it changed it to windows basic, but when I do that myself, it still doesn't work. I am starting to really dislike this program though.

 

Did it stop switching after you installed the modded nVidia drivers? I noticed that as well. Did you ever have static in your videos? If I could get rid of that static then I could just keep the Acer video drivers and still have functional HD DVD playback...

 

Yes it did stop switching when I installed the modded video drivers, I was just about to post that. I believe the problem to be the video drivers myself since now I can no longer watch hd dvds.

The original drivers worked fine, i would get static here and there but if I restarted the program, it usually went away.

I have a horrible sleep/hibernation bug with my computer so that's why I installed the video drivers, now I can't watch hd dvds. I don't know which one irritates me more.

 

I just wanted to follow up in case anyone else ever encounters the problem; all I had to do was format and do a clean install of Vista, install the necessary drivers and software, and the static during playback problem was completely fixed.

By the way, whats the sleep/hibernation bug? Haven't read about that anywhere.

 

The sleep/hibernation bug is a bug with vista using nvidia drivers, well most of the time. some of their older drivers would cause the computer to crash or not wake up from hibernation. it's not such an issue anymore though, from the looks of it anyway.

glad your problem is fixed though.