DVD on a Notebook

[DanStp]

I was having problems playing some DVD's (Goodfather Boxset) while on vacation. We had 2 notebooks there. Both were P3's one a 850 the other a 1 gig. The slower one was running XP with 512 meg of RAM, the faster one Win 2000 with 256 Meg of Ram. I first loaded Win DVD 5.0 on the XP one and it was horrible choppy sound and picture. Then I "downgraded" it to Win DVD 4.0, and it ran better but still not acceptable. The Win 2000 one had Win DVD 4.0 on it and it ran just alittle better, but still bad. What does it take to play a DVD on a Laptop these days? Thanks🙂

 

[thuned]

Load up the task manager and look at the cpu usage history. That should be able to tell if your cpu was the bottleneck. Doubt it is though, unless you're on speedstep and you force it to run at a lower speed.
You COULD try to copy the dvd to your hdd, that would eleminate your dvd drive as a possibility of slowdown.

 

[John]

What does it take to play a DVD on a Laptop these days?

I have a P3 650M w/ 512MB PC100 and an 8MB ATI Rage Mobility in my Latitude CPx and it plays DVD's smooth as silk using PowerDVD XP (version4). The ATI chips offer hardware motion compensation which offloads the cpu.

[*]Make sure DMA is enabled on your harddrive and dvdrom.
[*]Check for TSR's using up extra memory resources.

 

[DanStp]

Well I was able to check the P3 850 machine and both drives are set on DMA 2. There is very little other things running on that one. And no spyware either. It has an ATI Rage Mobility video chip with 16 meg of ram. I have hardware checked on the DVD program, is there anything else I can do?

 

[kayatai]

try a different dvd player program?

 

[ericboo]

I noticed that playing a decrypted DVD in PowerDVD 5 on my P4 2.4 1GB RAM desktop was very choppy too. I thought it was possibly the disk itself.

I saved the ripped files so I will have to switch back to version 4 and try again.

Have played disks fine in version 4.