Sound is Patchy While Playing DVD's

J

jeffpearl75

I am running Microsoft XP on my HP Pavilion dv8000 laptop. Recently I
can't play any DVD's without the sound being patchy. Occassionally the
picture is patchy as well... It makes it impossible to watch a movie
on my computer. I have tried updating all sound drivers, cleaning up
memory and choosing the option for the system to decide how much
memory to dedicate to running applications, etc. I have cleaned my
DVD drive and nothing has helped. My gut tells me it is a system
resource issue, but I don't know how to diagnose or fix it. Reason
for this is that when other programs are running the problem gets
worse. Normal MP3 files play flawlessly as long as I am not running
any large applications. When I am burning a DVD, though, they are
patchy as well. I was also wondering if anybody know if there is an
XP update that could be causing this as I never used to have this
problem, and I think this is the only thing I've done since before I
had the problem....?
 
G

Guest

I am running Microsoft XP on my HP Pavilion dv8000 laptop. Recently I
can't play any DVD's without the sound being patchy. Occassionally the
picture is patchy as well... It makes it impossible to watch a movie
on my computer. I have tried updating all sound drivers, cleaning up
memory and choosing the option for the system to decide how much
memory to dedicate to running applications, etc. I have cleaned my
DVD drive and nothing has helped. My gut tells me it is a system
resource issue, but I don't know how to diagnose or fix it. Reason
for this is that when other programs are running the problem gets
worse. Normal MP3 files play flawlessly as long as I am not running
any large applications. When I am burning a DVD, though, they are
patchy as well. I was also wondering if anybody know if there is an
XP update that could be causing this as I never used to have this
problem, and I think this is the only thing I've done since before I
had the problem....?
Click to expand...

whats the cpu running at when you are playing a dvd? if its reaching
100% that would be a culprit and I would check for malware running in
the background.

Flamer.
 
J

jeffpearl75

whats the cpu running at when you are playing a dvd? if its reaching
100% that would be a culprit and I would check for malware running in
the background.

Flamer.
Click to expand...

Yes, I think you are on the right track, but I've run all the
"malware" programs I know about and this PC is about as clean as can
be (to my knowledge)... sound and video are jumpy/patchy consistently
so it seems like there is definitely something eating up my
resources... it shows it is running at about 30-40% while playing a
DVD...
 
G

Guest

Yes, I think you are on the right track, but I've run all the
"malware" programs I know about and this PC is about as clean as can
be (to my knowledge)... sound and video are jumpy/patchy consistently
so it seems like there is definitely something eating up my
resources... it shows it is running at about 30-40% while playing a
DVD...
Click to expand...

are you using windows media player? it could be one of the codecs it
uses has a performance issue, try download a programme like divx and
just see if you get similar problems when playing dvd's

how much free hdd space do you have? is there a lot of hdd activity
when playing a dvd? .. disk cleanup/defrag perhaps..

Flamer.
 
J

jeffpearl75

are you using windows media player? it could be one of the codecs it
uses has a performance issue, try download a programme like divx and
just see if you get similar problems when playing dvd's

how much free hdd space do you have? is there a lot of hdd activity
when playing a dvd? .. disk cleanup/defrag perhaps..

Flamer.
Click to expand...

Of the 97 GB my hard drive has, I have 72 GB free... I've defragged
and cleaned up using "disk cleanup" and "ccleaner" and still no luck.
I can try Divx but my gut is it won't work because this happens on the
built-in DVD player from HP too... so it isn't only when using
windows media player... THANK YOU so much for so many ideas and for
thinking about this on my behalf... I appreciate your time and effort
on trying to help me out - please keep firing the questions and
ideas.. eventually we'll have to stumble on the answer...

JP
 
B

Bob I

Of the 97 GB my hard drive has, I have 72 GB free... I've defragged
and cleaned up using "disk cleanup" and "ccleaner" and still no luck.
I can try Divx but my gut is it won't work because this happens on the
built-in DVD player from HP too... so it isn't only when using
windows media player... THANK YOU so much for so many ideas and for
thinking about this on my behalf... I appreciate your time and effort
on trying to help me out - please keep firing the questions and
ideas.. eventually we'll have to stumble on the answer...

JP
Click to expand...

My money is on the drive running in PIO mode instead on DMA. Look in
device manager at the IDE channel controller properties Advanced
settings tab and see what it's running at. If it fell back to PIO mode,
uninstall and reinstall the IDE channel.
 
J

jeffpearl75

My money is on the drive running in PIO mode instead on DMA. Look in
device manager at the IDE channel controller properties Advanced
settings tab and see what it's running at. If it fell back to PIO mode,
uninstall and reinstall the IDE channel.
Click to expand...

Good thinking! I checked it and it is set to "DMA if available"
however the "Current Transfer Mode" is showing as "PIO"... how do
uninstall and reinstall the channel?
 
R

Rock

Good thinking! I checked it and it is set to "DMA if available"
however the "Current Transfer Mode" is showing as "PIO"... how do
uninstall and reinstall the channel?
Click to expand...

Good call by Bob. When XP detects errors it drops the mode to see if it
corrects the problem. Unfortunately it then doesn't change it back. See
this link for how: http://www.michna.com/kb/WxDMA.htm
 

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