DVD playback problem (sound, video, drive questions inside)

Last night I was trying to watch a movie on my HEL80 and the sound was very staticy (not the headphone problem in the big thread) and occasionally the video would slow down a little bit, like it was lagging. I'm not exactly sure how long ago this problem started, because I don't watch DVDs very often. At first I thought it might have been a scratched disk (it was from the library and those are always bad), but I tried some of my own and they had the same problem. By the way, this was in CyberLink's DVD player (WMP11 had even slower sound and no video). I'm looking for more suggestions before I call tech support, I'll say below what I've tried so far.

I uninstalled and reinstalled CyberLink.

I did the same with the sound card driver. Because I thought it might have been a sound card problem, I ran dxdiag. I went through the sound test and it played all the software buffer sounds fine, but then it told me that I don't have the hardware support for the hardware buffer sounds - that didn't seem right to me, which is why I reinstalled the sound card driver, but it gave the same result, is this how it should be?

I also checked the make sure the dvd drive was in DMA mode. Channel 0 was set to use DMA if available, and it was using it. Channel 1 was set to PIO only so I switched it, but it's still not using it. Do you know which the DVD drive is on? I thought it might be this because sometimes when I'm burning DVDs, it only goes at 4x despite having 8x disks and specifically choosing 8x.

Any other ideas before I call tech support? Thanks in advance


Solution: I was right about it being a DMA problem. Even though I was changing it (and it said use DMA if available), it wasn't trying to use DMA. I had to uninstall the second IDE channel and restart to let it reinstall itself. Now it seems to be working perfectly. It still says I can't use hardware buffering in dxdiag, but at least DVDs are working - anyone know about this audio?

 

Try WinDVD which is free.

Do you have AC3 installed?

 

I tried playing them in VLC and they were worse than cyberlink. I'm not sure if I have AC3 installed or not. I forgot to mention that MPEG2 files I've captured (from an external capture card) play fine, it seems to just be DVDs.

 

Make sure you have the latest video drivers installed as well, and the sound drivers. You might also consider just disabling the sound card and seeing if things clear up, because that will help you narrow things down.

 

Download and install K-lite mega codec pack, make sure to select a DVD decoder during installation and then try watching a DVD using media player classic... if that doesn't work change decoders by uninstalling / reinstalling... if that fails.. check your driver version.