[Samm]

To be honest, with a 450MHz cpu & that video card, DVD playback is not going to be brilliant. Which processor do you have? A Pentium 2/3 or AMD?
There may be couple of things you can do to help the situation though...
Firstly, make sure that the DVD player is configured as a master on the secondary IDE channel.
Secondly, go into device manager (start->run->devmgmt.msc) & expand the IDE Controllers branch. Double click on the secondary controller (assuming this is the one the DVD drive is on) & go to advanced settings.
Where you see the DVD player listed, if current transfer mode is set to PIO, change it to DMA. If it is already set to DMA, change it to PIO.

See if that makes any difference. If it doesn't, then I suggest you change the DMA/PIO setting back to its original value.

Out of interest, what are your display settings set to? i.e. colour depth & resolution

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The processor is AMD K6-2
I've tried 800x600 at 16 bit color and 1024x768 at 32 bit, still all chopped up
In device manager the dvd wasn't listed any place but it would have to be device0 or device1
I changed them both and back again to dma Still all chopped up
The funny thing is I put the dvd burner into an older 450 mhz intel with less memory and only 16 video memory, running windows 98se and it works fine. That's why I expected it would work here. I guess that I may have to put it back in that computer

[donr53]

The processor is AMD K6-2
I've tried 800x600 at 16 bit color and 1024x768 at 32 bit, still all chopped up
In device manager the dvd wasn't listed any place but it would have to be device0 or device1
I changed them both and back again to dma Still all chopped up
The funny thing is I put the dvd burner into an older 450 mhz intel with less memory and only 16 video memory, running windows 98se and it works fine. That's why I expected it would work here. I guess that I may have to put it back in that computer

[Samm]

I agree, if it works fine in an older, slower system, then you would expect it to be ok in the current one. Its possible that the problem may be to do with the fact you are running XP on the current system. I don't know, but that would appear to be the biggest difference between the two machines.

[donr53]

I think what I might do, is put the dvd player back into the other computer and make sure that it does still work fine. Now that still won't solve my music videos from the grandkids websites. Is there a setting somewhere that could have gotten changed, in the windows settings themselves. The audio is fine but the video is slow and choppy. Music cd's etc are fine.
Is overclocking something that would work in my case,If so where would I find a step by step instructions on how to do this.

[Samm]

OK. First off can you confirm that these music videos are being played straight from the website, as opposed to them residing as video files on the hard drive?
If they are being streamed from the website, what program do you use to watch them? (i.e Realplayer, Quicktime etc)

Have you tried playing any video files (such as .avi or mpg files etc) that are actually saved on the hard drive? If so, is the video still choppy?

[donr53]

The music videos come from the kids website NOGGIN.com They are opened with windows media player. I had to do a search of video clips to find avi and mpeg files. They are very small clips, but they seem to work,maybe not perfect, but they work. A lot of them had no sound. I went into safe mode with networking, and went to NOGGIN and the music video played fine but no sound. That probably because of safe mode and I don't know how to turn it on. The dvd I tried showed the warning at the start of the video, but then showed an error. Error F4D41436 Can't play when tv out function is enabled Display not working properly. Again probably because of safe mode

[Samm]

When you got error F4D41436, you were using PowerDVD v4 or higher to play the DVD disc, right?
If so, the reason is that some video cards with TV-Out function must have the TV-Out function disabled before powerDVD v4 or higher will work. It is disabled by powerDVD itself (apparently to prevent piracy) & this error message is related to TV-OUT being enabled.

I suspect you are correct about safe mode being the reason for this error in that case. One work-around for this, is to use powerDVD v3 instead.

You are also correct in assuming that safe mode is the reason for the lack of audio. In safe mode, only the essential drivers are loaded & as audio isn't considered essential, the sound card drivers will be one of the ones that aren't loaded at startup.

As there appears to be a noticeable difference in video performance when you start Windows in safe mode, I'm wondering whether your problems are being caused by one of the drivers. In particular, either the Nvidia driver or the chipset (AGP) driver.

Can you tell me which Nvidia driver you have installed? i.e is it the driver from Nvidias website or from the CD that came with the video card? Also, what version is it?

Do you know which chipset you have? As the cpu is an AMD k6-2 (socket7), I suspect the board may have either an ALI chipset or Via MVP3 chipset. Can you confirm this?

BTW, if you are struggling at all to find out this info, try downloading & running Everest.....
http://majorgeeks.co...tion_d4181.html

[donr53]

I did download everest and am surprised at the information that you need to know about a computer.

The nvidia driver that I had in was version 5.1.2001.0 date 7/1/01
Then I went to nvidia website and got version7.1.8.9 date 4/1/05 not digitally signed didn't work to good,so went to windows update and now have in version 4.5.2.3 date 7/28/03 bios version 3.05.00.10.54 in. doesn't seem any better.

I am using dvd 5, that's what came with the player.

apg controller is version 1.00
motherboard chipset via vt82c598 apollo mvp3
motherboard chipset ETEQ6629

There were these couple of messages
no cpu L2 cache found This may cause performance penlty
motherboard chipset cannot cache the whole system memory, this may.....
It also states that the system and video bios are over 2 years old

I hope that this is what you wanted and that it may help

thanks

[Samm]

Thanks for the info. From what you've told me from the Everest report.... (1) I was spot on about the Via MVP3 chipset! (2) I think we need to have a little rummage around in the bios

So I can guide you through the bios settings more easily, can you see if Everest tells you what the motherboard manufacturer & model number are please?

[donr53]

This is all from Everest

Motherboard ID 05/11/2000-VP3-586B-8669-2A5LES2BC-00
Motherboard name Soyo 5EMA+
Motherboard chipset ETEQ6629

BIOS type Award Modular
Bios manufacter Phoenix Technologies
Award bios type award modular bios V 4.51pg
Award message 5EMA+Family-1EA1

Hope this helps Thanks

[Samm]

Right, lets check the bios settings.....

Can you reboot or power on the system.
As soon as the monitor LED turns from amber to green, press the DEL key repeatedly at 3 second intervals until you get into the bios

Next, check the following settings i.e change the values to match the ones I've given :

[BIOS FEATURES SETUP]
->CPU INTERNAL CACHE - ENABLED
->EXTERNAL CACHE - ENABLED
->PCI/VGA PALETTE SNOOP - DISABLED
->VIDEO BIOS SHADOW - ENABLED


[CHIPSET FEATURES SETUP]
->CACHE RD + CPU WT PIPELINE - don't alter, just let me know what it is currently set to
->AGP APERTURE SIZE - 128MB
->AGP -2X MODE - ENABLE


[PNP/PCI CONFIGURATION SETUP]
->ASSIGN IRQ FOR VGA - ENABLED OR AUTO


Remember to save your changes then exit the bios. Your system will now reboot.
Let me know if any of these alterations have made things any better (or any worse!)

[donr53]

Samm
cache rd + cpu wt pipeline was enabled
Agp aperture size was 64 so I increased it to 128
it didn't make any difference.

Everest mentioned that there was no L2 cache Could that be my problem?
I went to Soyo motherboard site and got a look at the manual for this MB and it states it has an onboard L2 cache of 1mbyte. Pipeline burst. It even tells how its broken down
1mb cache ram 64kx64 on u2,u3
tag ram 32x8 on u5
cacheable range wt 256mb wb 128mb All this is new for me
This computer has a lot of waiting time over the last few months, more then normal

I've been on the web reading about L2 cache. aparently this speeds up the waiting time.
My next question is if it's supposed to be on board, and it's not showing up, how do I fix this.

I hope this information will be of help.

Edited by donr53, 03 February 2006 - 10:58 PM.

[Samm]

Hi

The bios settings I asked you to change should have re-enabled the L2 cache. Can you check Everest again & see if it's still reporting L2 cache as being disabled?

[donr53]

Sorry Samm, but I'm afraid this isn't what you wanted to hear. It still reports 0 for L2 cache. This is going to be the hard part. I've been reading online about L2 cache and I've run across a word that I heard before. It was prefetch, I still don't know what bearing it has with L2 cache. But a couple of months ago in one of these geekstogo catagory It was asked of me to run prefetch and delete all that came up. Could that be the trouble?
I've downloaded a program called Ctp2info.zip It suppose to fix L2 cache, It is in what I think might be german, but I found enough in the text to believe it is ok for this but I not sure if I should run it.
I also told where to go in the registry to find some of this. I've looked ONLY but I think it will need to have values or something done.
Thanks Donr53

[memberix]

The thing is everest i looking for L2 cache on the CPU but the L@ cache is on the motherboard. Don't worry you have L2 cache cause without it everything will be painfully slow. The early AMD CPU weren't that great for multimedia
and 450 PII beats K6-2 in terms of multimedia performance