[da_burl]

Well, its a long weekend, and I expect to have at least a few hours each morning to try to screw my HTCP up royally before I start bbq'in and drinking beer.,

My goal, to play DVD's with Zoom Player, with DD and DTS SPDIF, with Windows XP. I had previously been using PowerDVD XP with no problems, and had been very happy, until I saw how good the pic looks with ATI/Ravisent!! There are numerous threads going on, and I have seen several people posting lately about audio/video sync problems, that is the problem I am having. I really don't care which audio filters I end up using, I have the choice of PowerDVD XP, Ravisent/ATI 7.5 or 7.6 (or some older ones on CD), and WinDVD 2000 or 3.1.


My equipment


Athlon XP 1500+/ShuttleAK31A 512M DDR


Radeon AIW 64DDR (says 7200 in XP), not planning on using anything but the output, no capture


MAudio Delta DIO 24/96

I am using the SPDIF from the card, haven't tried the ATI card SPDIF out, but I suppose I could after all of this


I will add my IOMAgic PVR into the mix after the rest is working.


My plan:


Pull all cards but the video card, disable APM in the bios, and do a clean install of XP. Get the networking and a few configuration items set.


Ghost it NOW!!


Install ATI Drivers (1st try, I am going to use the latest, latest drivers, but if I have problems, I have the 6025 drivers too, ghost back, and try those)


Install Dio and use latest drivers 5.10.27, I also have the earlier ones, and the VxD ones, same philosophy, use ghost if necessary)


For each driver combination, try various combinations of ZP with ATI MMC/DVD for video, alone 1st, then PowerDVD audio, then WinDVD next, re-ghost when necessary.


Hopefully, I will hit on a combination where ZP can use the Ravisent for Video, and some audio filter that will play in sync with it, in PCM, DD, and DTS!!


If anyone has any other ideas, or a winning combination for Windows XP, please feel free to pass them along! I have read, searched, read some more, and most of the threads end up with "yeah, I have sync problems" without much resolution

!!

I know my system is not "clean", it has had a Geforce TNT2 and a Creative Live in it, and used to be my general purpose PC, with a CDBurner, and lots of video crap (TMPGENC, PVR s/w, DVD "backup" s/w , etc) XP seems to handle the drivers well, but there could be some residual crap hanging around!!


Plan B, try ME (don't want to do that, I really like XP, you really don't have to do much but install it!!). Guess I'll leave a 4G partition for an "alternative" os though.


TIA


da_burl

 

[da_burl]

A little update, I am still "almost there", but not really.


I did a completely clean XP install, ghosted it, then loaded ATI drivers (6071), MAudio drivers (5.10.27), MMC/DVD 7.5 (leaked 'net version), Zoom Player 2.60 final, PowerDVD XP, and WinDVD 3.1. This was ghosted too. By turning off APCM in the bios, I now have my IRQ's quite nicely distributed, no sharing or conflicts!!


Now to play with ZP, and the filters.


I also found a thread that led me to use quartz.dll in place of ma_delta.dll, and this helped the various M-Audio dvdgraphs that say "not for 2000 or XP" to function as far as I can tell.


Still having some (from ever so slight to very noticeable) audio/video sync problems. For example, I watched about an hr. of Gladiator in DTS, which played perfectly with all of my main dvdgraphs, which are Ravisent Video (did the reg. tweaks), and M-Audio, Windvd w M-audio or DirectSound or Waveout, and PowerDVD w MAudio, DirectSound or Waveout audio filters. However, just cannot get my Soprano's Season 1 which is Dolby Digital, to be perfectly in sync with any of these filters, even using the SetFilterSync. Come to think of it, I haven't really checked too many other DD dvd's, maybe its a DD problem in general. Sopranos, by the way, plays beautifully with Power or Win DVD, I just want that great picture of the ATI/Ravisent!! It is also out of sync using ZP to use WinDVD video/audio or PowerDVD video/audio filters.


I admit, I haven't yet built a custom graph just for my system, using Graphedit. I am going to try that, since I have a Delta Dio, and it seems these filters were made for an Audiophile 24/96, it seems a lot more people have the AP24/96 out there, although they use the same drivers.


Then, I suppose I might try Win98SE, hate to do that, but it seems to still be the standard for the absolute ultimate HTPC. I dread revisiting the IDE/VIA chipset debacle, even though I have a KT266a chipset m/b, its still a VIA at heart! Then again, I could do this on my ECS K7S5A instead, and leave this one alone for now.


Gnollo, consider yourself fortunate, I am not having quite the luck you had, although I followed your XP HTPC guide to the "T", really appreciate it. I dread trying to install 98, then go through all the updating just to get up to the latest IE, WMP (not really using that anymore), chipset drivers, etc. XP in general is good to go, except the vid card and sound card drivers.


I guess I could also just use PowerDVD for the "problem" titles, and use ZP/Ravisent when possible, but I just can't leave well enough alone sometimes!!

 

[gnollo]

Mmmh.... have you tried to upgrade your motherboard to the latest firmware as well? I am using a different motherboard and a different processor... I will test soon my M-Audio SPDIF out, but at the moment I am just all over the place, it is likely you will have to wait until next month, at this rate...

Building a filter is the next suggestion.