DVD Issues

[Ripskin]

I recently got myself a good TV, and until I can afford to build my HTPC I have been lugging my main one in and hooking it up to watch movies ETC.

System Info;

My DVD Drive is a basic Sony 16x DVD Rom.
DFI NFII Ultra B and 2Ghz Athlon proc. 1GB of PC3200
BFG 6800GT oc for DVI out (latest drivers)

Software players;

PowerDVD 6
ZoomPlayer Pro

Problems;

With Power DVD I had the video to playing fine but there is a little pixelation and "cryspness" issues that I can live with. What I cannot live with is the artifacting and lag outs that I get every few seconds. Some lag is not too horrible and corrects itself quickly. But at times it will pause the playback for a few seconds before resuming. The audio runs perfectly through the S/Pdif out unless its one of those few second lag outs.
At first I though it was just the cheapo DVD Rom, but then I loaded up ZP.

With Zoom Player I went in and selected the PowerDVD dvd Decryption for video and Audio, for the audio renderer the onboard NVidia (have tried default direct sound but Nvidia sounds better to me) Under Additional Filters I put in the FFDshow Video Processor to force movies into the 1080 resolution and run some clean up on the video.
As ZP is less intensive it has seemed to clean up all lag and artifacting with movie play back.

And for my tests it worked perfectly testing full DTS es and video quality on Return of the King. After a few minutes I close ZP and pull up PowerDVD to check the difference. Power DVD now will only play audio and no video. Pulling ZP back up it keeps giving me Filter error's no matter the combination. If I remove FFD Show from the list it will go through and play about half of the time but the video quality is lessond now as well as audio. Power DVD will still not play any video.

If I remove everything and put it all back on it will work minus the FFD Show, for some reason ZP refuses to work with that now and once I try PowerDVD loses its video playback. I am planning to buy the pro version of ZP and get off the trial but cant pay for it at the moment. Could that be whats causing my FFD show problems? While playback in ZP is better without the FFD show tweeks I might as well go back to using my PS2 as a DVD player.


Also what DVD players do you reccomend (hardware) as well as software filters?

Sorry for the really long post but this has been agrevating me for a few days now and finally have given up.

 

[madhoosier357]

Try VLC Media Player. It has always worked for me.

 

[m0deth]

also check which ffdshow you are using, i've had troubles with the chip-specific versions in the past.

I used pdvd for years and noticed on occaision, that on some computers, it tends to corrupt itself like this, and doesn't like going back easily. I had to completely uninstall it, search and remove all related files, do a registry search and clean, I also chose to defrag at this point, which may have helped...then reinstall everything including ffdshow, vlc, and pdvd being last, then everything worked again, also, uncheck hardware accel in pdvd on that 6800 and see what happens, it sounds like you have an older pdvd6 install, and certain cards did not like it, especially the 6800gt agp's, cannot remember why now, noticed it in another forum.

it's too bad you dont have a crappy extra comp lyin around, vlc does a nice job of streaming content from one machine to another for display in other rooms, and it's free, and plays damn near everything you throw at it as long as you have the proper codec setups.

 

[shadowfax]

the RealMagic Hollywood Plus is a good card. It's also expensive, but if you can find a Creative DXR-3, it's the same card, rebadged. Usually a lot cheaper. It was one of the few Creative products I've ever had that I actually really liked. Should install that thing again.