M9750 w/ SLI having difficulties doing Blu-Ray

Sometimes it can play a movie fine, but sometimes it has some lagging issues.

My player is the Lite-On external via USB 2.0 that I got from Newegg. My m9750 has SLI, 4 gigs ram, tons of hard drive space, I unplug everything that is USB except for the Blu-Ray player, I exit out of all unnecessary taskbar things such as AntiVirus and IM clients. Just doesn't help much.

I forget which drivers I'm using but do you guys ever have any of these issues? I'm using PowerDVD which I hate but since it's the only Blu-Ray software out right now, that's what I'm forced to use.

Ryan

 

less hardware bragging, more describing symptoms please

 

OK part of the problem was I was sitting in my school library trying to talk about my laptop when it wasn't right in front of me.

My video driver is 173.53 and have no idea why I chose that one out of the others except for most things it has been working good (SLI, gaming, and running an external monitor when I need to which is not very often).

A description of what happens is the blu-ray will go to play and in particular when the camera pans across the screen, it has noticeable loss of frames per second. It looks choppy and not a smooth panning. Also, less often, the speech doesn't sync up, sometimes as much as three seconds off.

Some movies are fine. Some movies are painful to watch because it does it a lot. I just watched License to Wed and it was fine, but the time before I was watching Fools' Gold and it had some serious lagging issues as described above.

Hopefully that helps.

Ryan

 

hmm... is this specific for films? e.g. does Fool's Gold always get choppy?

 

I know that I tried rebooting my computer as well as turning all unnecessary services off and only slightly did it help, but it still had the issue no matter how many times I tried.

I have a feeling PowerDVD is a little glitchy maybe? Maybe it's decoder is poorly designed or that it isn't designed to work with SLI? I wish there was another program to try...

Ryan

 

what DVD software does AW ship with its BR-equipped models? also, you might want to give the newest AW video drivers a shot. i think they're 176.10 or something, are WHQL-certified, and other BR-users (notably, Oodle Bear) have reported that BR playback works (better?).

 

Go into the nvidia control panel and turn sli off before viewing the movie and see if that resloves the issue.

 

Okay next time I get my movie from netflix in on blu-ray and if I'm having issues with it, I'll first turn off SLI, try it, then if it's still bad, then i'll change out the driver first with SLI on and lastly, off.

Any other tips of things to try?

 

it's probably pointless, but you could try to experiment with power settings... maybe your GPUs aren't allowed to run fast enough to process the movie.

 

This is something that no one ever brings up about USB vs Firewire vs Internal mounted Blu Ray. USB is the lowest in terms of data movement, Firewire 400 is next followed by the 800 and then the internal.

I have the same problem when editing video, USB makes choppy playback where as internal has no problems.

Plus the USB setup for the 9750 unless you have external power to that Blu Ray does affect they entire system. I have had a few USB 2 items plugged in at once and there is always an issue with them working correctly, I have to unplug one.

Driver issues maybe just one of the problems, but if you could firewire it see if that changes anything.

 

The Blu-Ray has it's own power cord going to a wall socket. It only uses USB 2.0 to connect...

 

Actually, that's mostly likely because your internal drives are configured for the fastest write caching and best settings, whereas anything ATTACHED to the system is configured for "quick removal" and therefore runs as slowly as possible for data integrity.

I was going to suggest something, after looking through device bandwidths and looking at the BD spec for Bitrate...

First, the BD spec. fastest bitrate for data transfer is 40mbps... I'd like to point out, at this juncture, that these are all in BITS per second... don't expect these kinds of transfer rates in bytes per second, however, I'm using ALL bits per second for comparison purposes.

so BD spec. highest bitrate is 40mbps
USB 2.0 (Highspeed) spec. bitrate is 480mbps

almost 10x faster.
(for the record, USB 2.0 Highspeed is, in theory, faster than Firewire 400 (which runs just under 400mbits/s) )

and as long as you havn't purchased an external enclosure for a 5.25" external drive, then slapped a Blu-ray drive into it and figured it should be fine, the USB host on the external device should be fast enough, and the USB spec. for the m9750 is for USB 2.0 highspeed, and therefore fast enough.

The issue? DMA.

We first hit DMA issues with DVD... DVD, though, much less bandwidth intensive (max datarate around 8.5mbps), still needed DMA in order to cache and access the data in a timely fashion in order to keep the video in sync and playback correctly.

I think this may be the problem. Though, you can blame SLI all you want, but when you turn that SLI off, and it still runs like junk, then it's not your problem.

Turning off services or other applications won't help, neither will much of anything else. nothing is using that data channel (to the USB, or to the video) as intesively as any bandwidths should be limiting. the max data rate of the Blu-ray disk should be the limiting factor.

THEREFORE, we move to settings. I suggest attaching the device and checking the device properties for every device in the chain. (to do this, change the view mode to "by connection" and find the BD Drive)... slowly check each set of settings from the drive itself, to the PCI controller and ensure all speed accellerating settings are on. most likely you'll find the most significant amount of options on the USB device that controls the drive and the drive itself. you'll have to poke through a few tabs in each devices properties to find the settings you'll need.

It's likely you'll find the device is set up for quick removal, rather than speedy access. Making this simple change could fix all the problems at the same time.

good luck, and please let us know.

 

Excellent, I'll look into that in a hour or two when I get my blu-ray movie in the mail to try it on...

 

i would just return the external player and try to get the internal upgrade from alienware or a ps3. the 9750 has like a one hour battery life anyway.

 

Well, in particular my laptop has about 20 minutes of battery life even with all the settings set to battery saver.

Reason I got the external was because an Alienware upgrade would cost approx 300-400 dollars (never did ask how much one would cost because they won't talk to me since I purchased the laptop from another person).

The external cost 150 bucks.

My roommate already has a PS3 and I don't own my own HDTV, I've been using my laptop for everything.

We'll see how trying some of these things will help out.

 

I was checking Alienware's website and they had 5 drivers listed, a few that look like they might be newer, but no date listed as to when they were released.

Then I checked nVidia's website and saw that Alienware suggested that they provide a certain driver not available on Alienware's website. It's 175.32 and right there it suggests using it with the m9750 when using m9750GTX's in SLI. I'm downloading it and will install it and see how that goes...

Drivers are certainly a *****

 

Ok it appears that it's doing okay with this blu-ray disc (Twister).

I'll post back again if I come across another one that is having issues.

Ryan