Golden Compass Playback Issues

[pseudomaniac]

Greetings.

I have a homemade Media PC

Pentium D 3.0 / 4gb RAM / XP SP2 / Geforce 8500 512mb with HDMI

My BD Drive is a Lite-ON DHO-41S.

I'm a 10 year IT Pro - the software and hardware / drivers on the PC are perfect and tuned.

I can play every movie I've tried in it. Disney's Cars, Die Hard, BlackHawk Down, Fifth Element to name a few - all work fine and play very well.

I am using PowerDVD 7.x that came with the drive. I'm less than impressed, but it was bundled anyway.

I tried playing a newly opened Golden Compass DVD tonight, and the sound channel remiains steady and clear, but the video jumps all over the map. Staggers - jumps - sputters - plays fine - then jumps again.

I upgraded the firmware on the drive from 5.1 to the newest 5.6 and still see this problem.

Does anyone have any ideas or reccomendations on how to fix?

Most appreciated!

[Obiit]

First off DVD or Blu-ray?

Which version of PowerDVD are you using? Only the Ultra's 7.3 or 8 will accelerate HD codecs properly and if they aren't accelerated the CPU does the codecs and can max out causing stuttering etc.

[ALBLU]

I have had the same issue on my Sony BDP-S1

[maxmcleod]

what exactly is it doing? you didn't quite explain what it does when you insert and start playing the movie...

[pseudomaniac]

The movie will begin to play - menus load - etc. but there is noticeable jumpiness with the video / audio.

I can watch the CPU load pegging at 100% during the behavior - which accounts for the jumpy behavior.

I am running the SATA in Enhanced mode - no legacy - everything is UDMA5.

PowerDVD 7 BD Edition doesnt do as well with it as WinDVD 9 Plus does - but neither are watchable.

Any fullscreen video with motion is unwatchable - jump - jump - jump - skip - frame drop - etc.

My HTPC Plays Disney's Pirates / Cars / Die Hard - and everything else I've tried just fine.

I upgraded the firmware on the BD Drive to the most current - no dice.

I'm running the most recent NVidia Drivers - Tried running the NTune Wizard - Running the Most Current DirectX - Most Current Intel Chipset Drivers, and every un-needed service (even Antivirus Disabled) is out of memory and processor. The only things running are necessary win processes and WinDVD - and it jumps.

Any ideas? I have the PureVideo acceleration enabled - I would think the Video Card should be doing more of the work.....

[Obiit]

Daft as it seems try some of the earlier drivers for the Nvidia card? Motherboard BIOS update as well?

Somebody has said that the newer nvidia drivers aren't as good as the older ones but i cannot remember who said it or where!! I have had that for games before so it doesn't surprise me.

The video card should be doing more but as it isn't your CPU is trying to take up the slack and not quite managing it.

[maxmcleod]

Originally Posted by pseudomaniac

I'm running the most recent NVidia Drivers - Tried running the NTune Wizard - Running the Most Current DirectX - Most Current Intel Chipset Drivers, and every un-needed service (even Antivirus Disabled) is out of memory and processor. The only things running are necessary win processes and WinDVD - and it jumps.

i actually had some wierd color fluxuation when watching this movie in windvd 9 plus

in cyberstink it played just fine...
by most recent nvidia do you mean the stable release or beta?

Im using the 174.74 beta drivers, seems fine to me.

it could be the Pentium D 3.0 though, dual core helps out a LOT with bluray playback...

[Kierre]

Watched it last night... eventually. For some reason in the BDP-S1 it didn't take the first time, i.e., "cannot play this disc". I simply took the disc out and tried it again and it worked just fine. I did not experience any issues with the playback... once I got it started. My Sony has whatever the latest firmware revision is.

OOPS, scratch that. I am currently on rev. 3.70. 3.80 came out earlier this month.

[Obiit]

Originally Posted by maxmcleod

it could be the Pentium D 3.0 though, dual core helps out a LOT with bluray playback...

What really helps out is a graphics card that accelerates HD codecs correctly. CPU grunt is only needed if your graphics card doesn't cut the mustard

[Flux88MPH]

I played the Blu-ray on my PS3 over the weekend and it played great and looked beautiful.

[pseudomaniac]

The 8500GT is the best slimline NVIDIA I could find - and I refuse to run an ATI card because of the poor driver overhead.

I upgraded the system to an E35 chipset intel board and a Core2Duo 4600 last night.

Movie playback is fine - though I also noticed the color change problems in WinDVD 9 Plus - PowerDVD 7 played it back seemingly fine, and CPU load never hit more than 35-40%.

I'm running XP Pro - and I also refuse to go Vista, but wonder if Microsoft didn't build any better media coding into Media Center Edition - which I've only looked at briefly - but looked like Pro with some playprettys on it.

It seems absurd to me that a Pentium 4 3.0 HT socket 775 can't handle movie playback with a dedicated PCI-E 8500GT.

I'm very disappointed with both the Nvidia drivers and the PowerDVD / WinDVD settings areas because theres no where it tells you or lets you change "Hey - Use the D$*n video card to Render - Yes, Really" aside from a randomly greyed out checkbox (seems to do with playback) to enable PureVideo.

[maxmcleod]

glad to know that i wasn't the only one that had the trouble with the color changing thing in windvd 9

I think no matter what card you have the dual core is necessary though, i mean why not? haha

I wonder what causes the color changing in windvd though...
oh well.