DVD drive hangs in the middle of a movie...

[Boricuamed]

Hello:

I recently bought a Shuttle Spacewalker DVD drive, and it really plays movies quite good on my machine, but for somes reason whe the movie is at about half-way through, it starts to studder, end sometimes it hangs. Does anybody know what could be happening?

This is my computer setup:
Asus a7v133 mobo
256 RAM (PC-133 CAS2)
Elsa 32Mb Ge-Froce2 MX SDR
Shuttle DVD-Player (setup as secondary Master)
Phillips CDRW-401 (setup as secondary slave)
Maxtor 20Gb UDMA66 (setup as primary master)
Samsung 4.3Gb UDMA33 (setup as primary slave)
LAN card
External ISDN modem

Now, I have the 4 drives on the Promise ATA100 controller, and I cannot select the "DMA" in windows, but I guess that it is automatically activated...(I don't know)

I'd really appreciate any input, because since I switched mobo's now I can't play an entire movie without this problem.

p.s. I have a Ravisent Software DVD decoder installed (v 1.0.02)

Thanx in advance...

[Mayet]

You may have to change your software player. We tryed three on win2k before we found one that works with out stepping the movie. Try one like Trueblue Quasar dvd. Hardcard is an option if you have the room but I don't think they are much better than the better software players... We still use the software and ended up selling our hard card. 32 meg geoforce mx maybe ok but there are better quality video cards that do a much better job at playing dvd around at the moment.

[Boricuamed]

Well...after reading the reply I decided to fiddle around with the drive setup for a bit and I found this to work...So if there's anubody out there wit a Shuttle DVD-ROM drive here's the way to go:

1. Set the drive as a secondary slave (even if you only have one HD)
2. The drive is NOT going to be properly recognized by ATA 100 controller chips (like my board's promise chip), so only connect it to the IDE connector.
3. If you only have the DVD for a CDROM, connect it to the middle ribbon connector...for some reason it works best this way...

Hope this resolves someone else's problem also...

[GOVTECH]

Like Mayet, I would try different player software. It worked for me.

[computron99]

I just had this problem with the exact same DVD drive. I have a DVD drive in a Demo Pc (PIII 1000, 128mb pc133, Nvidia TNT2 16mb, SB Live!, MSI6309 mo-bo, WinME). The movies would freeze up at random. I never got past 45 minutes though. I tried the WinMe DVD software, Mediamatics DVDexpress, and the PowerDVD that comes with the drive. All three of them frooze. Luckily, I have several drive here. I tried another drive (exactly the same) and after 2 weeks @ 10hours a day, I still haven't had it freeze yet.