windvd 4 hangs computer

[Hogan's Ghost]

Hi. I have a new Khypermedia drive that came w/ WinDvd 4. When I try to play commercial dvd's the computer hangs, no picture or sound from the dvd. I can end task out of it. I tried a vcd and the same thing except it played a few seconds of audio from the menu screen before hanging. The drive seems to work fine, plays cd's and cdr's no problem, DMA enabled. Using DirectX8.1 The dvd itself shows up on windows explorer.

Intervideo does not support OEM versions of windvd and Khypermedia does not offer any support either. Can anyone jump start me on making this work? Thanks.

[monzie]

Is WinDVD installed correctly?

Download the VLC media player from the TOOLS section.....its freeware and plays everything you can throw at it.

[Hogan's Ghost]

I ran the installer and it said installation was successful, how else might I know?

I will try VLC. Let me just say that intervideo sucks for not supporting their product.

[Hogan's Ghost]

After more experimentataion this seems to be related to Overlay issues. I tried disabling hardware acceleration and noticed that horizontal blocks where windvd displayed status info on the screen had the movie playing underneath while everything else was just the windvd logo screen. Digging into the options for my Geforce3 ti200 I see that there is a set of Overlay options that affect the appearance of DVD's played back on the computer, but they are all greyed out. I will look at updating drivers but this is not a new video card, the ones I have are relatively recent. Any other thoughts on Overlay and what may be causing this?

Oh, I tried VLC but it has similar problems. VLC will show the 0 track intro movie but any attempt to get past it gets a fatal error and the program closes.

[monzie]

Only one app (or display) at time can use the Overlay.................do you have anything else running that might be using it .........for example NetMeeting (oh and it doesn't have to loaded just sitting in the sys tray or in the task manager list is enough).

As for VLC go into Preferences tick the Advanced Options box and untick the Overlay Video Output box....and try it again.

Whats your OS? Do you have TV out and if so which display is the PRIMARY the Monitor or the TV?

[Hogan's Ghost]

Thanks Monzie. VLC now appears to work fine. WinDvd has progressed: I can hear the movie playing and see it under the blocks of the info overlays. I will search it for a similar function. Any suggestions?

Using win98se. Monitor is primary, other choices are greyed out.

[monzie]

What INFO overlays?
Do you mean the SetUp Screen or the Player or something else?

[Hogan's Ghost]

I mean when the movie starts windvd displays info like "Play" in the top right and "Volume 14" with a green volume indicator along the bottom of the screen. I assume these are overlayed on top of the video, because I can see it playing underneath, but only in the rectangles around the windvd displays. The rest of the screen is the same windvd logo screen you see before any movie is inserted.

Windvd did not have any "no overlay" option like VLC. At one point rather than freeze it gave an error message "can't display. Try lowering screen size or color depth and try again". I progressively lowered both settings to their lowest possible but still got the same message.

I am out of town this weekend but will try any other ideas when I return. I don't know what else might be using overlay, task manager is basically empty. Could a desktop picture be considered an overlay? All I can think now is to look around any config type files for overlay or something else that might be related.