A2D - Video Overlay Problem

Hello everyone,

I think this post doesn't only concern A2D owners, but some other laptops (not only Asus laptop I think). I happen to have an overlay bug, which manifests itself as me not being able to play any movie in windows media player, or any other video player that uses overlay. I also don't see any video from games that use overlay.

The symptoms: when playing a video file, I hear the sound, but there is no image. If I close the media player window, then the whole computer freeze and crash.

What makes me think it has to do with the video overlay is that when I de-activate the use of overlay in wmp, I can play the file as usual (except I don't use the overlay capability of the video card, which results in a performance hit if I'm doing something else on the computer at the same time, if I understoof well what the video overlay is for ). Also, in BSPlayer, if I de-activate the use overlay option, then it works well there too.

It happened to me about 4 months ago, and at that time, I didn't have much time to investigate, so I restored the initial partitions, and everything was fine again (meaning, I think, it was not a hardware-related problem, but more software-related). Now, about 2 days ago, the overlay stopped working again.

I often use the S-Video connector to use a second monitor, and I think it might be related, something as if the video card was maybe trying to send the video data through overlay on the second monitor, but as the second monitor is not plugged in atm, it fails, and crash. Also, I'm currently on travel, so I unfortunately can't test and see if it would work again with the second monitor plugged in

Anyway, does anyone know about a problem of this kind?

 

I believe this is the well reported ATI overlay bug which you will find in the offical release notes for the ATI drivers.
I would look to ATI specific posts for a possible solution.
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ASUS M6Ne 15.4" WSXGA 1.7 PM ATI9700 80Gb HDD 1Gb RAM

 

hello everyone.

i just excusivley registered here because i found this thread which is dealing about the very same problem i have got SINCE ages with my Asus A2D.

yoram exactly hits the nail on its head with his description and i am not able to fix the problem with no matter how hard i try..
i have latest public bios (210A), latest directx (dec2006) and latest mobility catalysts 7.1 and am running WinXP SP2.
i know i didnt have the problem with the pre-installed winxp home, but that one didnt have any service packs and i meanwhile upgraded to winxp professional with sp2 integrated.

please .. if anybody knows how to fix this problem without turning off hardware accelaration PLEASE let me know..
i couldnt be more desperate about this, as the entirey notebook becomes pretty useless without video playback capabilities..

thanks in advance.

 

RDJames are you also using multiple monitors (or S-Video)?

 

no, i am not using multiple monitors. it's just the integrated TFT.
and it was just yesterday when i installed winxp (sp2 integrated) again.
so the cause for all this is not an old dusty installation - everything is fresh right now with just the most relevant things installed which are:

1. Windows XP Professional incl. SP2 + all hotfixes until Dec2006
2. ATI Mobility Catalyst 7.1
3. SIS AGP Drivers
4. Direct-X 9.0c (December)
5. DIVX Codec (latest) and some divx.com movies for testing.

BIOS for my A2D is the most recent. (v2.10a)
on another forum i read, that a guy having the same issues has resolved everything by updating the BIOS, but ASUS didnt release anything since feb.2005 for the A2D.

for video playback i use the divx bundled player, which uses overlay mode.
if i use for example zoom-player and use another video renderer, like VMR9, everything works flawlessly.
however there are a lot of applications, like games for example, which require the overlay mode.

another workaround is to reduce the hardware acceleration by three notches from within the troubleshooting sections of the display properties.
but that workaround is not feasible, since it involves other problems.

something is completely wrong here software-wise.. and i have the feeling, that it is associated to some service pack 2 hotfix because when there was winxp sp1 installed, everything worked right.

there has to be a solution to this, but i feel nobody even cares since only 9600 and 9700 mobility chips seem to be affected.

 

please somebody help