Video playback issues on new HD

J

jkdufair

I've been stumped by this issue for a few months. Wondering if anyone
has ideas on how else to troubleshoot this problem.

I have a P4 2.8GHz w/ 2x80 IDE RAID 0 drives. Gigabyte mobo w/ built
in RAID. WinXP SP2 installed on RAID array, 1GB RAM. I recently added
an OEM Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JB 250GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra
ATA100 Hard Drive as a secondary IDE master (DVD+RW currently set up as
primary IDE master) with the hopes of doing some editing of home
movies. It's formatted as NTFS. No slaves on either IDE channel.

When I try to play back any video stored on the 250GB drive, it looks
like a noisy mess. Sound is OK, iirc, but the video is just blocks of
random color with specks of random noise added for good measure. This
is the case whether it's DV-AVI or WMA or DiVX or whatever.

When I copy the file to my system drive (i.e. the RAID array), it plays
back perfectly. Copy it back to the 250GB, looks like junk again. So
I don't think the file is getting corrupted.

Does anyone have any idea what could be happening? Is it a transfer
rate problem? Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot or fix the
problem would be very welcome. TIA.
 
P

Peter

When I copy the file to my system drive (i.e. the RAID array), it plays
back perfectly. Copy it back to the 250GB, looks like junk again. So
I don't think the file is getting corrupted. ....
Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot or fix the
problem would be very welcome. TIA.

Did you try to temporarily disconnect DVD drive and play from WD?
Any better?
 
R

Rod Speed

I've been stumped by this issue for a few months. Wondering if anyone
has ideas on how else to troubleshoot this problem.

I have a P4 2.8GHz w/ 2x80 IDE RAID 0 drives. Gigabyte mobo w/ built
in RAID. WinXP SP2 installed on RAID array, 1GB RAM. I recently
added an OEM Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JB 250GB 7200 RPM IDE
Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive as a secondary IDE master (DVD+RW currently
set up as primary IDE master) with the hopes of doing some editing of
home movies. It's formatted as NTFS. No slaves on either IDE
channel.

When I try to play back any video stored on the 250GB drive, it looks
like a noisy mess. Sound is OK, iirc, but the video is just blocks of
random color with specks of random noise added for good measure. This
is the case whether it's DV-AVI or WMA or DiVX or whatever.

When I copy the file to my system drive (i.e. the RAID array), it
plays back perfectly. Copy it back to the 250GB, looks like junk
again. So I don't think the file is getting corrupted.
Does anyone have any idea what could be happening?

Likely you havent got DMA working on the 250G drive.

Could be a bad cable and lots of retrys tho.

Could be some problem coexisting with the DVDRW.
Is it a transfer rate problem?
Likely.

Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot
or fix the problem would be very welcome.

Check the DMA status

See what happens without the DVDRW drive connected
and if that fixes it, check that you have both jumpered
properly. You can get weird effects with bad jumpering.

If that doesnt help, try another cable.
 
J

Jason Dufair

Rod Speed said:
Check the DMA status

Thanks for the suggestions, all. It turned out that the "Advanced
Settings" tab in my device manager was missing and after Googling a bit,
I realized that I had Intel Application Accelerator installed on that
machine. The drives were in UDMA mode already, but I saw that the
version of IAA I had was a couple years old. So I installed the latest
version I could get from Intel and that seemed to have fixed the
problem. Yeah! Now I can bore all my visitors with hours of video of
my kids. Again, thanks for the pointers.

I put IAA on that machine when I built it a few years ago. Does anyone
recommend for/against using IAA vs. the drivers that come with XP SP2 in
general?
--
Jason Dufair - (e-mail address removed)
http://www.dufair.org/
"I believe it's a sin to try and make things last forever
Everything that exists in time runs out of time someday
Got to let go of the things that keep you tethered
Take your place with grace and then be on your way"
-- Bruce Cockburn
 
P

Peter

I put IAA on that machine when I built it a few years ago. Does anyone
recommend for/against using IAA vs. the drivers that come with XP SP2 in
general?

IAA does not seem to be maintained anymore, therefore MS XP drivers are
preferable. Unless there is a need for specific IAA feature that is not in
MS
product.
 

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