DVD Player driving me insane

[Keelor 0]

Okay, I've been working on this problem for a while now, and I just can't seem to pin it down. Here's the deal: whenever I play any DVD in my DVD drive, the movie stops at some fixed point in the movie (generally about a half hour, sometimes about an hour) and won't continue past that point. Here are the various "fixes" I've tried:

1. Playing with the DXR3 decoder, and playing with the PowerDVD software player

2. Switching the DVD drive to the master of the secondary chain

3. Disabling and enabling DMA

4. Buying a new drive

5. Uninstalling and reinstalling the DXR3 drivers (PowerDVD software still had the same problem even with no hardware decoder drivers)

6. Ending all possible tasks and processes

7. Changing video card drivers

 

Here's my setup:

Windows 2000

Primary IDE channel: IBM 30 GB GXP as master, DVD Drive (was Hitachi GD-2000, a generic 8X now)

Secondary IDE channel: PlexWriter 12/10/32A on master

Hercules GeForce2

Sound Blaster Live!

DXR3 decoder card

Linksys ethernet card

AMD 800 MHz Thunderbird

MSI K7T Pro

 

Note that DVDs played fine until a few weeks ago, but I can't figure out what changed to cause the problem--the most likely culprit seemed to be the new PlexWriter, but I removed that and it didn't do anything.

 

Does anyone have _any_ idea what's going on here? I'm getting extremely desperate.

 

~=Keelor

[GHackmann 0]

Try moving the DVD drive off of the primary channel and giving it its own. I had to do that to get mine to work right without skipping, since it didn't like my DMA66 hard drive. (Gotta love the KA7-100 with its 2 extra IDE channels. )

[Keelor 0]

Actually, I had tried that, and it didn't do anything to help. After a few hours of work this morning, though, I figured out the culprit--the "Plextor Manager 2000". Once I uninstalled that, my DVD player went back to working perfectly.

 

~=Keelor

[JediBaron 0]

If you read the PowerDVD installation notes, you will see that it tells you NOT to install it with a hardware decoder installed. If you want to use the hardware decoder then install the Creative Win2k beta drivers with the registry hack and then use the Creative DVD Player. If you want to use software decoding then remove the Dxr3 card and it's drivers and software. Either case, before you go one way or the other remove every driver and piece of software and install what you want from the start again.

[Keelor 0]

The only reason I had even installed the PowerDVD software was to figure out if I had encountered a bug in the Creative Player. The fact that both a software decoder and a hardware decoder stopped in the exact same spot indicated to me that the problem was somewhere else--which is was.

The PowerDVD software wasn't even the full version--I just needed "outside" verification of the problem. Like I said, it was all Plextor's fault anyway.

 

~=Keelor