DVD Playback Trouble

Hey everyone. I had a question about playback of DVDs on the Asus W3v, and any trouble you guys may have had. I have one of these machines and yesterday when I was trying to play a DVD the picture kept jumping every two to three seconds and the sound was absolutely terrible, crackling and impossible to hear.

I was wondering if anyone had any similar issues. I've now tried using three different DVDs and continue to get this problem. I have plugged the laptop in as well as used battery and yet it still occurs. Sometimes, it even happens when I try to play an audio CD. MP3s and everything still work fine though.

Whenever I put in a DVD the hard drive starts spinning and the machine slows down quite a bit too. I appreciate any help you can give me.

Dokta

 

Few questions:
Did this happen from the date you got this open?
Did you install somethign other then asus dvd?
Did you play with the settings of media player or asus dvd?
This can be a poorly calibrated optic laser. It can be software tho unlikely from what you desribed. We are actually working on the same exact problem on a z80. Do you exprience freezing of the os with asus dvd? In the case of the z80k we are working on it was not software and not the drive. Looks like its the motherboard tho we will give the software another shot. If it turns out to be anything other then hardware i ll let you know

 

You probrably need to install some codec's.

What are you using to watch?

 

I've had my laptop since June and this is the first time I'm experiencing this. The crackling noise occured using a CD at one time, but the sound was crisp and clear when I used the autoplay function leaving the laptop off, and just powering on the CD player.

I used VLC, Windows Media and PowerDVD to play the DVDs but the problem occured on all the software.

I haven't used Asus DVD yet, I don't even nkow if it's installed on my machine.

 

Any more ideas? Help!

 

How is your CPU utilization? I had a similar issue with a W3N, but it was not really related to DVD playback, rather it was only during such activities I first got aware of the problem to begin with. HControl.exe had stopped responding and was using 100% CPU causing the DVD to skip or similar. Depending on what I was doing I guess it could have been hours before I noticed it. After the issue had occurred a couple of times I rolled back to a previous ATK0100 driver, and the problem went away.

 

My CPU utilization doesn't really change all that much.

I noticed when I'm playing CDs with certain software (Itunes, etc) the sound crackles, but when I play the same CD right after using something like Audiograbber the sound is fine.

Anyone have any idea what it could be? Something tells me its software, but I have no clue.

 

Checked that your DVD drive is running UDMA-33 and not PIO mode? That could cause the slowdown you describe, and CPU heavy, inefficient transfers might cuse other issues as well.

 

How do I go about checking that and changing it if need be? Thanks for the tip and the help

 

Go to the Device Manager (My Computer properties -> Hardware tab) and open the IDE controller subtree. Dobleclick the correct IDE channel and look at the advanced setting tab. The transfet mode should be set to 'DMA if available' and the DVD drive sould have the current transfer mode listed as Ultra DMA mode 2.

 

Update ide drivers?

 

Shouldn’t be necessary. The default MS drivers seems to work best for Intel chipsets. Windows just get confused sometimes and disables DMA for optical devices. Sometimes it’ll even flat out refuse to enable it even after changing the setting and revert it back to disabled after the mandatory reboot. I’ve seen this on several laptops previously, especially those that are hotswapable. If the BIOS settings are correct it’s usually fixed by deleting the drive from the device manager, reboot, and let Windows redetect it.

 

I checked. My Primary IDE Channel is on DMA if Available and Ultra DMA mode 5. The Secondary IDE Channel was on PIO, but I changed it to DMA if Available, and it remains on PIO transfer mode. It won't let me change the transfer modes though.

The DVDs still don't work

 

The primary channel is the HD, so that's fine. Try stopping the drive, remove it, and then reinsert it. The DVD drive beeing in PIO mode can certainly be a cause of sluggish behaviour. I'd check that DMA mode is enabeled in the BIOS and if the windows setting won't stay in DMA mode after a reboot, then delete the drive from the device manager. On the next boot Windows wil reinstall the driver and hopefully the correct setting will stick.

 

Windows, by design, disables DMA mode for certain drives after seeing multiple time out or CRC errors:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=817472

 

Righty. Thanks for the link. Thought I had seen something to that effect somewhere before, but obviously failed miserably at locating it when I went searching the MS knowledge base earlier.