Smooth playback...

[epicasino]

Hello, thank you for reading. This is my problem: until last week I had a 550 Mhz Pentium III processor, a Soyo motherboard (with a VIA chipset) and a Diamond Savage 4 32MB card, with this system I couldn't get full screen DVDs to work properly (by 'to work properly' I mean to play smoothly, or completely smoothly), not with PowerDVD or WinDVD, or Cinemaster 99. Last week I upgraded to a 1.5 Ghz Pentium 4 processor, a Soyo motherboard (with Intel's 845 chipset) and 256 mb of RAM (I had 128). With this new system, overall playback was better, but I still had problems with full screen titles! due to some problems with my Savage 4 Video Card, the guy from the store gave me for free a new TNT2 card with 32 mb and tv out. This card works better, but I still have the same problem!
Of course, I installed the latest motherboard drivers, video card drivers, Directx 8.1, etc. I'm using WinDVD 3.0 and PowerDVD 4.0 XP, and none of them seems to work right. I'm using Windows 2000. Any help will be greately appreciated.
By the way, I have a Sound Blaster Live! card with the latest drivers. Oh! and yes, I have DMA on.

[setarip]

If your system permits, make certain you've got the DMA turned on for the DVD drive.

[admin]

There used to be a time when VIA chipsets had problems with DMA, although installing every VIA driver update you can get seems to solve some of these problems.

Make sure you install the latest drivers for the Intel chipset (get it from Intel.com), which should enable DMA automatically.

The Savage4 is also known to have problems with DVD playback, either poor quality with the acceleration option turned on, or slow/faulty playback with acceleration.

TNT/TNT2 Vanta/M64 cards are also quite bad, since they have a stripped down bus bandwidth compared to the full TNT/TNT2.

Considering you have a P4 1.5 GHz, you should consider getting a faster graphics card, which would really increase your system's performance. A GeForce2 Ti is a good budget card (although prices for it will have to drop a bit), with good overall 2D/3D performance.

If your hard-drive is old, perhaps gettings a brand new ATA-100 7200 RPM drive may also increase system performance (although it probably won't help DVD playback).

And if you haven't tried, turn on video acceleration options under PowerDVD video configurations. WinDVD's acceleration options can be tweaked using DVD Genie. Video acceleration may decrease picture quality, but should increase performance.

And you may not think it, but 4/6/Dolby Headphones channel audio decoding is quite processor intensive, so you may try to turn it off and see if it increases performance or not.