DVD-ROM audio

[shoofy]

I recently installed a new HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDR8162B drive into my Dell Dimention 2400 desktop. It works perfectly with everything except when it is playing DVDs. The video is fine but the audio is very flickery (if that is the right adjective). You can hear enough to tell you that you are in fact hearing hwat is supposed to be playing (i.e. the correct voices, etc.), but you can't make out any of the words. This happens regardless of which disk or software you use. I have checked all of the connections and have tried plugging the audio cable into all of the different slots on the sound card (Creative SB Live! Series (WDM)) and even not had the cord attatched at all, all of which resulted in no change. DOes anybody have any idea what could be causing this?

[Quality's Proof]

Peruse the thread, "Needing some major help.", in the software section and see if anything "clicks" (audio codec missing, etc.).

[shoofy]

As far as I can tell all of the audio codecs are there. Any other ideas?

[Quality's Proof]

Well, if you did peruse the threads, you should have at least (4 audio codecs?). Do you have 11 different listings, when you go through the control panel as that thread stated?

EDIT :

Did you also try setting Windows Media Player as the default DVD Player (to find an audio codec you might not have found as happened with thread-started and solved problem)?

[shoofy]

How do you set Windows Media Player to be the default DVD player? Just assign to be the default program for openning a .dvd file?

[shoofy]

Okay I did that simply by installing the latest Windows Media Player from Windows Update. Unfortunately, after rebooting it did not help. I did notice, however, that as it plays the DVDs it counts the seconds unevenly, so it will count 1,2,3 really quickly and then slow down for the next couple seconds and it does this seemingly at random. I'm wonderring if the drive is constantly changing its read speed as it reads? Is this possible? I downloaded CD-ROM tool (http://cdromtool.sourceforge.net/downloads.php) but it couldn't adjust this drive (it was stuck at 20x). If my problem is with varying read speeds, is there any way to fix it?