ATI X1400 - DVD playback problems

Hi,
New to these forums. Just wanted to ask a question of the experts. I have just bought an Acer 5672 and it has a Radeon X1400 which I assume is a mid range graphics card. I don't do any real gaming and thought it would be useful for improving my DVD playback performance.
I have noticed that when playing DVD files either straight from disc or from files on the hard drive that I get sort of picture clitching every so often and a general feeling of unsmoothness at certain points of playback. The same files and discs played on my desktop PC have no noticable playback problems. I have set the hardrive to never switch off during DVD playback but this seems to have made no difference. Any ideas?


Intel Core Duo T2300 (1.66 GHz, 667 MHz FSB, 2MB L2 cache)
15.4" WXGA CrystalBrite LCD with 16ms refresh rate.
ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 512 Hypermemory
80GB 5400 RPM SATA hard drive
Slot-Load DVD super multi drive
1GB DDR2 dual channel memory
802.11 a/b/g wireless
ExpressCard slot

 

Try upgrade the drivers on the card. Sometimes that can get rid of the problem, but somtimes it doesn't. Also, if you have a program like Limewire installed, try to delete that. Some of those types of programs can slow DVD playback for some reason. Hope this helps.

 

Try a good PC DVD player program like Power DVD.

or maybe

Try VLC media player which is free and good aswell.

 

would vlc actually properly play the dvd and menus? I think it can just play the partial mpeg2(vob) files on the disc.

I would upgrade your drivers to one of the latest Omega driver sets (Guaranteed to be newer then what ever came with your laptop). Also make sure your IDE controller in device manager says your drives are working in a DMA mode of some sort.

Also make sure the disc is clean. If it has scratches, theres no telling what a cheap laptop drive will make of it.

 

Media Player Classic + FFDShow.

 

Sorry forgot to say, unit came with Acer Arcade as DVD playback software, this only seemed to play DVDs direct from disc (not from VOB files on HDD) and seemed to be glitchy so I installed WinDVD 5 which is supposed to be dual core compatible. This doesn't seem to have improved the playback any so I don't think it's a software issue. Don't get me wrong it isn't majorly unstable on playback, I just seem to be able to see a sort of unsmoothness in playback (jerky I suppose) at certain points which I don't notice on my desktop PC.

With a dual core and dedicated graphics I just wasn't expecting any playback issues with this laptop. I wonder if anyone else has noticed it on their Acer Aspire.

 

What you need to do is enable DMA mode; right now your drive is in PIO mode and that is very slow.
-Right-click My Computer, Properties, Hardware tab
-Go into the Device Manager
-Expand the "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" group
-Double-click the Primary IDE Channel
-Go to the Advanced Settings tab
-Make sure the Transfer Mode is on "DMA if available"
-Repeat and do the same for the Secondary IDE Channel
Let us know if that fixes it.

PIO mode is where the CPU and support hardware directly control the transfer of data of data between the system and the hard disk. Very slow; the CPU gets bogged down the more data is transferred.
Sometimes the drive will fall back to PIO mode if you insert a scratched/damaged CD. There are numerous reasons though. Some computers come with PIO mode enabled by default.

 

zx, status on video driver?

btw even if its not a dual core player, even one core should be more then sufficient for dvd playback. Windvd and powerdvd should have no issues like that either. On my old celeron laptop, the old version windvd that came with it was actually the only player capable of smooth playback on that laptop.

 

Thanks Chaz for the advice......I checked and its already set to transfer at ultra DMA 5. Whatever that is!
I'll maybe download new drivers for the graphics card from ATI website.

 

I found with my X1400 that the set of drivers you use is very important. Some driver sets made the colours go all wonky on movie playback. But the latest Catalyst's worked great for me before I dumped Windows.

I would recomment VLC as well, it does fully support the menus and uses very little processor power. My system had no trouble playing the 14 movie files at once I accidentally highlighted and clicked enter on.

 

Personally I hate VLC. Its a great thumbdrive player because it handles corrupt videos well and doesn't need to be installed, but its MKV support is broken, its subtitle support is broken, its using internal codecs which are dated now, its not fully a dvd player, and the interface/settings are downright ugly.

For dvd's, I have one of the latest powerdvd or windvd players around, otherwise I use Zoom player with the CCCP codec pack (which primarily uses ffdshow) to play everything else.

 

Contacted Acer and they suggest going into the properties of the graphics card and lower the acceleration of the graphics hardware and see if this improves things....Surely the hardware should be capable of running at full acceleration......especially for DVD playback!.....Let me know what the experts think and are there any other Acer 5672 owners that have had to do this?

 

Did you try installing new drivers as was previously suggested? Do that if you haven't already:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=64910

 

I had a set of nVidia drivers for my 6600GT do that for me, try a driver set one behind what you are using and see if that fixes the problem. (or - if you arent running the latest, use them)