P4S8X-X: Playing DVD Crashes System

Specs:

P4 2.0a 400mhz FSB
768mb DDR PC2100
Gigabyte/Radeon 7000 AGP 32mb
Samsung SH-W08AEN 8xdual DVD Burner
XP Home Edition

I've all the latest bios and driver updates for this board, but no matter
what DVD player I use, InterActual, PowerDVD, or WinDVD, the system crashes.
When using the InterActual player I get a choppy picture and audio for about
30 seconds or so before the system crashes. With WinDVD and PowerDVD, I get
choppy audio but no video. I put a 64mb Radeon 9000 in the system, but the
results were the same.

I put the burner in a P4S800, P4 2.4 800mhz FSB, 512mb of DDR PC3200, 64mb
Radeon 9000 system and had no problem at all. Any and all suggestions are
welcome.

Thanks,

Curt.

In article , "Curt"
wrote:

Specs:

P4 2.0a 400mhz FSB
768mb DDR PC2100
Gigabyte/Radeon 7000 AGP 32mb
Samsung SH-W08AEN 8xdual DVD Burner
XP Home Edition

I've all the latest bios and driver updates for this board, but no matter
what DVD player I use, InterActual, PowerDVD, or WinDVD, the system crashes.
When using the InterActual player I get a choppy picture and audio for about
30 seconds or so before the system crashes. With WinDVD and PowerDVD, I get
choppy audio but no video. I put a 64mb Radeon 9000 in the system, but the
results were the same.

I put the burner in a P4S800, P4 2.4 800mhz FSB, 512mb of DDR PC3200, 64mb
Radeon 9000 system and had no problem at all. Any and all suggestions are
welcome.

Thanks,

Curt.

DVD playing is a pretty complicated thing to analyse. Your symptoms
make it sound like drivers are in place, and those drivers have the
applications you've tried, convinced that usable video and audio
capability exists on your computer. The WinDVD and PowerDVD results
almost sound like data is being queued up for video output, until
whatever limit there is in the size of the data structure, is
reached. Some DVD players, for example, adjust the player speed
to run just fast enough, to keep a FIFO queue half filled with data.
It sounds like the FIFO queue is filled with video data, but it
is not being output.

So, some things that could be broken:

1) Bad memory. Test it with memtest86 from memtest.org
2) Bad IDE interface or drive. You've proved by running it on another
machine, that it works, so that probably isn't it.
3) Is the DVD drive running in DMA mode or PIO mode ? If PIO, it
could be your processor is running at 100% just trying to pull
data from the DVD drive. See if there is some way to monitor
percent CPU while the application is running, as without DMA
enabled, your CPU could be swamped.
4) Audio or video driver doesn't really support whatever operating
mode the program needs. Perhaps you could try Windows Media Player,
and see if it can handle streaming media to your video card,
without a problem. Take a look in the application's preferences,
to see what video output methods are supported - normal frame
buffering, overlay plane, etc. Try another output method and
see if it works better. One guy who had a problem like this on
the TV output on his machine, got output by enabling the overlay
method.
5) PCI bus setting "Delayed Transaction" and "PCI Latency Timer".
Reading data from the disk drive, travels over the PCI bus,
or competes with the PCI bus for bandwidth. On some computers,
enabling "Delayed Transaction" prevents the IDE interface from
eroding what PCI bandwidth is available. This in turn, makes
it possible for a PCI sound card to work properly. If you are
using AC97 sound, I don't know what exact bus the AClink uses
to get sound data, but that could be dependent or interact with
PCI as well.

Your BIOS has "PCI 2.1 Support", and that probably enables
Delayed Transaction for you. So, your PCI 2.1 should be enabled.

While the manual recommends "PCI Latency Timer" [32], you could
experiment with a slightly lower setting. I wouldn't go below
[16], because the impact on total system performance is too
severe. At least varying this setting a bit, might help identify
whether this is a bus issue or not. Lower settings make the
pieces of hardware "share" with one another better, at the
expense of efficiency.

In an ideal world, I would want to decompose the problem into
individual tests you could run. In this case, I don't know enough
of the details about how a DVD plays, to be of more help. This
could very well be a driver problem, but how do you tell what
aspect of the driver is being used ?

Drivers that might be involved:

SIS IDE driver (would be nice if the standard MS one could be
used instead)
Chipset AGP driver
Video card AGP driver, and Control Panel code
DirectX - giving you DirectSound
AC97 Soundmax sound driver

HTH,
Paul

Paul,

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll try them all and let you know how
things turn out.

--
Regards,

Curt,
'May the best of your past be the worst of your future'