I don't get it... I have gone through 2 DVD players... and still can't watch a god damned movie.

It's really pissing me off.

Currently, I have an Abit mobo, Pioneer DVD burner, 3 gigs of ram and a Gforce video card with 512k on it.

Everytime I put in a DVD, the image and audio stutter. It's annoying.

With some players, I get pic and no sound.

ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have tried Power DVD (came with player), Nero (need to buy a damned codec), DivX, but it won't touch a DVD, WMP, but it breaks up, and VLC media player, no go, either.

Any thing I am missing? I am about ready to blow this drive and start all over again.

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Pocket protector and braces.

Matthew

Get an Apple

Download the AVS player - it's always worked for me regardless of the DVD or the PC
AVS Free DVD Player

Trying... I will let you know!!!

+1 on the Mac.

Sorry, I had to say it.

I don't understand why you need to go get software to play a DVD. I just slide in a movie and watch it on any of the four Macs I have access to. Never downloaded any player of any kind.

A die-hard PC user here in the office broke down and bought an iPod about a year ago. Then bought an iPod Touch. Then took the plunge on an iPhone.

Last week he bought a MacBook, and is totally thrilled with it.

Next time you need a computer, consider it. I've read they actually run Vista better than a PC does. But that might not be saying much...

Anyway, I've been using Macs for over ten years with no major problems.

Not helpful now, I know. I hope you get it sorted. Sorry for my rant.

For the codecs (free) see HERE
That might be what the problem is. What operating system are you running?

I don't think there's such a thing as a diehard PC user.

FWIW, I've used most of the software you listed without issues. But personally I don't like sitting upright in an office chair to watch a movie on a 18" monitor.

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No problem. I've been listening to this "rabble" for almost twenty years. Yet as a Windows Network Engineer, I'm constantly asked if I can repair and support Macs. My reply is usually 'I didn't know Macs break or EVER needed repairs". I mean really now! The closest Mac guy is over 60 miles away and is SO busy he charges double what I make and can't take in any more work!

In the business world you write a letter with a pen, not a box of crayons. Nuf said......




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Can you say that if you don't believe in God?

Well, my box of crayons plays DVDs just fine. IN VIBRANT, BRILLIANT COLOR!

For clarification - I am a non-practicing atheist. Think about that statement VERY CLOSELY.

The AVS viewer is finally working, but the playback is still somewhat studdering. It is odd, really... it's like there isn't a big enough buffer and the audio/video take a moment to catch up. Odd.

The DVD is a concert video by Jimmy Buffet. I don't get it.

So you go to church?

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I gave up on religon and became a practicing Wicken....

As to the DVD - do you have the same problem playing other DVD's on the PC?

Does the DVD play correctly on any other PC or DVD player?

Are you SURE the DVD isn't rum soaked? (It is Jimmy after all)...

Any other programs (like antivirus/spybot scanners) running at the same time as the DVD player?

I could come up with more questions - but I'm only on my first cup of caffine.....

I was a Pagen once, gave it up for lent.

Well... those are all good questions... I have AVG anti-v running and SpySweeper. On access, they start to freak. I will check.

the DVD is dry... sadly. And not hacked.

This problem is not consistant, from what I can figure. Some DVDs are ok, others are not. God forbid I try to watch a DVD off my recorder... The readers barf on DVD-RAM formats.

Get back to the caffine... I am sure something will give here.

oh, and Kevin, it's a 22" wide screen monitor... plenty large enough.

I'd make sure everything that's TSR is shutoff.
In the case of AVG, just turn off the resident scanner.

The more CPU and memory the DVD get's the better it plays.

For Instance - Animusic 1 & 2 will kind of play on my PC, but it's choppy because of the video and complex audio - however they both do fine in either my stand alone DVD player and the stand alone DVD-R

yea, I will try that. makes sense, really.

But I woulda figured with 3 gigs of ram, some TSR's wouldn't matter.

It's not a matter of memory - things like AVG and some spybot scanners look at the files as they're processed.

Thus the video and audio files are both scanned for nasties before being transfered to the processor.

and therein lies the problem. I shoulda figured that one out.

Welcome to the wonderful world of balancing hardware and system software to the application.....

Uh, yeah what he said....Microsoft sucks too!

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yea... you got that right.

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MS does not suck... they are just the 800 lb gorilla... and that makes them a target.

Some of their software has been very good... Win98 was pretty damned good, so was Win2k. WinXP has grown up to become a fairly good OS.

Office 2003 rocks, and 2007, tho different, is not that bad. What I don't like about O2003 is some of the wacky formatting that gets inbedded into the Word documents. I really hate it when I hit delete on a given line, and the rest of the document changes it's formatting!!!

I haven't used 2007 enough to determine if this bug has been removed.

In general, the biggest problems with MS is that they have to support their old stuff and try to integrate new. This means their base architecture has to be able to do both. Apple, whenever they come up with a new OS, simply make the old stuff garbage. Upgrade, and upgrade everything.

MS cannot afford to allow that to happen. As neat as it would be, they simply cannot do it. You see, there is too much invested in business software and corporations can't afford that to happen. One of the biggest problems with Vista is that applications written in VB6 might not run right. If they do run, that's great, but the VB6 environment will not run in Vista! So you can't maintain it! There is over 10 years of VB6 code sitting out there... and this is why business is running XP still.

In short, there are problems with being the 800 lb gorilla.

I think Microsoft sucks, Apple sucks, Dell sucks, IBM sucks, computers suck.

There's really no need for them, and overall they waste more time then they save.

I disagree with that. The computer does things faster and better than a pen and paper ever could. The different ways data can be analysed, and so much faster, is exceptionally useful.

I did get it working. I put the DVD drive on an exception list so it does not get access scanned. Figuring that 98% of what goes in there is either a) stuff I have already backed up, b) store bought software c) store bought music or entertainment or d) processed pictures, then I don't see a problem.

You disagree to much. Try to be more agreeable.

There are still alot of bugs in Mircosoft products. They will never fix them all unless someone else comes out with a bug free program.

There is no such thing as a bug free program.

Being a software engineer, I can tell you that conditions exist that no one can predict or plan for.

Programming is one of the most complex jobs, because you have to take into consideration all the variables... operating systems... you name it.

A great example:

Last week at work, a piece of software started to fail. It never gave us a lick of trouble since it was put into production 14 months ago.

This program, written in VB6, copies files from a lab workstation to a server that stores all the files from the lab instruments.

All of a sudden, with a new lab workstation (PC using XP) started to fail. After they are copied, they are validated to make sure nothing failed during the copy. The problem was with a CRC32 check (a CRC, or cycle redundancy check, confirms that the file is what it claims by checking it's contents and creating a number. If they match, the number should match). The files, tho apparently identical on both the workstation and the server were failing the CRC32 check.

I tested the failing files with another comparison tool and it said they were the same.

I found that the OS was puking on the comparision. For whatever reason, the files on the workstation were not being checked correctly. I changed the program from a text read to a binary read and that fixed it.

See? It took 14 months for this issue to rear its ugly head.

Microsoft has thousands of developers, and literally millions of testers... this tells me exactly how complex what they are doing really is.