DVD Problems with stutter still

OK now I am really confused!!!


I went back to mess around with the system and it isn't doing it right now. The light on the player comes on like it is supposed to (about once every 2 seconds or so.)


This does not make me feel better though because last night it ran for about 45 minutes before exhibiting the same behavior right in the middle of a movie. The drive isn't getting too hot and neither is the system.


Please help!!!


Thx,


Cameron

Hi Cameron:


___This is a simplistic sounding solution but have you cleaned those disc’s? If you have, have you ensured that System Restore isn’t running in the background under Millennium/XP if you are using either of those two OS’s? How about anything else running the background? WinTop under 9x/Millennium or Task Manager under 2000/XP will show you what’s going on in the background if anything.


___These are very simplistic of course but it truly sounds as if the disc’s are possibly dirty, there is a background process doing some disk maintenance via the IDE controllers or that the drive is overheating a little bit. Except that the SD-M1202 causes the same so overheating is a bit far fetched at this point?


___Good Luck


___Wayne R. Gerdes

___Hunt Club Farms Landscaping Ltd.

___ [email protected]

OK I have unpluggged the IDE controller from the slave DVD.

I have updated my motherboard drivers.

I have run a virus check with the latest and greatest.

I have checked for anything running in the background using Sandra.

I have done all of the hints for the 24/96 to keep stuttering from happening on a VIA motherboard.

I have tested the Digital out breakout cable for the 24/96 to make sure there are no shorts.

I have swapped the DC-2 port to make sure that it wasn't a connection problem.

I have audited all IRQs and none of them are shared.

Plus a million other things.

No luck.


I did find out something though. Analog out is working fine for DVD playback on the soundblaster that I have installed. I think the root of this problem may be an incompatability between my 24/96 and my motherboard. The one thing that doesn't make sense is why it started exhibiting this behavior in the middle of a movie.


Anyway, I am going to try a few more things this evening, and in the event that it doesn't work out, I am going to research alternate quality soundcards and or processor motherboard combos. There are other machines in my house that would love to be upgraded anyway.


Thanks,


Cameron

You may never get rid of it. Some of us have gone through ever possible, conceivable step short of sacrificing small animals in a pentagram of candles (and some may have done that) and we still have small amounts of stuttering.


I'm using all blessed components and have everything as optimized as it should be, but I still get some stuttering. I've kind of given up on it for the moment and just live with it, but it still bugs me. There really isn't anyone who has the tools to fully debug such issues, which could be any number of combinations of software and hardware, so its still a bit of a voodoo/luck type of thing to some degree, though there are plenty of things that definitely help and should be done, and those have been mentioned above.


But you might do all those things and still have the problem, and there will be no real explanation for why that is so. It would probably require someone using a processor/bus emulator system to figure it out, and even then it could be difficult perhaps, since catching a spurious event in the midst of megabytes of data blasting through a system might not be so easy. And the explanation, even if found, might be completely specific to a particular combination of hardware/software and the installation order thereof.


Anyway, its a complex system, running inside a complex system, running inside a compex system, none of which were specifically designed for what we are using them for. I'm not trying to be overly gloomy here, and I obviously subscribe to the concept since I've been using an HTPC for some time now, and my concept of the future definitely places the HTPC as the center of the home theater in a big way. But until the manufacturers start supporting this type of application directly, and work out all of the issues so that it becomes standarized, we will probably have to live with these less than optimal glitches for a while.

Hi Cameron:


___I did not realize you were using a VIA based chipset … Having had similar symptoms w/ older KX/KT133/KT266 a and non-a boards (I do not know about the 266a’s since I have not purchased one yet), I can only suggest you move away from the VIA inside solution for the best stability/compatibility out of an HTPC. I don’t know if you have seen the many problems w/ these chipsets posted here in the forums in particular but if it is not a background process, Drive setup, or CD/DVD-ROM drive itself that is causing the problem, you may be surprised to find that it is the chipset itself even though it was working 100% previously. This is what I love about the OC’ed BX chipsets, OC’ed and non-OC’ed I815 E/EP’s, and now the OC’ed/non-OC’ed I850’s I have had my hands on … They do not exhibit this behavior w/ the 24/96 cards I have used no matter how I beat them up with. I believe Dean was using an I815 E/EP and was having some kind of trouble with this which was frustrating for me as well given my great success with the Intel combinations for so many years now. I feel for your problem currently but if you have already isolated the 24/96 card to its own irq (on VIA boards, this can be the difference between stuttering and not) and you are still receiving the stutter, the real solution IMO is to move away from the VIA chipset altogether or at least reformat that drive, install the OS from scratch and place the HW and their drivers in a single piece at a time. If you need assistance on how to alternate IRQ’s for the card or the slot positions we have used in the past for this exact reason, the search function should lead you to some of the older posts dealing with this exact issue.


___I own VIA and SiS based HTPC’s in my own household as well as having built them for others more than I care to admit too but for HTPC uses, you are placing yourself behind the 8 ball before you even fire up your first DVD with a VIA chipset board IMH (humble) O.


___Please report feel free to report back what you have found as this is a common trouble shooting theme here in the forums for the VIA chipset owners in particular.


___Good Luck


___Wayne R. Gerdes

___Hunt Club Farms Landscaping Ltd.

___ [email protected]