A couple questions about DVD?

[MGully]

I just put together a system with a Duron 800 and a Maxtor G450 dual heads and when I use Maxtor's DVD player it is very choppy. Is this the program or something else?

Also I have an Asus K7M motherboard and Athlon 500 what speed of processor would I need to watch a DVD without hardware encoding?

 

[mdXtreme3d]

make sure DMA is enabled for your dvdrom (in win9x, under cdrom properties in device manager, in win2k under IDE controller in DM) - it's the #1 cause of choppy playback. make sure you have the latest chipset/AGP drivers for your mobo. you should be able to play DVDs on your system no problem

 

[MGully]

So its not Maxtor's DVD player?

 

[AU Tiger]

Do you mean Matrox?

The system should be plenty adequate to play the DVD as I have played DVDs on my Pentium 3 600Mhz with my ATI Radeon 32MB and Radeon DVD player. Power DVD also worked without any problems.

 

[Salvador]

Yep.. Enabling the DMA or Direct Memory Access was the best tip I've gotten in a long time. My dvd's were unplayable until I enabled DMA and now playback is perfect.

Sal

 

[huanaku]

My sister has a 366 celeron EMachine. I put in a 2x dvd, and it plays surprisingly well with PowerDVD version 2.55. Your Duron 800 should play DVD's great. Try powerDVD or winDVD (download trials from their sites) to see how it works.

 

[NelsonMuntz]

My brother-in-law has an eMachines POS @ 333 MHz and it plays DVDs without skipping or jumping. I think there is some hardware decoding going on since it was designed around the DVD player and has built in ATI video, but it still is able to play them fine.

 

[MGully]

I have changed the DMA setting and it is working perfect. Thanks to all for helping.

So is my Athlon 500 fast enough to run a DVD without hardware decoding?