King of all newbies!

[dvdnewbie2005]

I'm sorry to waste all y'alls time with such a bsic question, but I am so new to DVD on computers. I bought an OEM NEC 3540A from NewEgg, and am just starting to dip my toes in this giant DVD pool. I am having troubles even getting out of the gate (sorry for mixing my metaphors), though, because I can't even get my DVD player to play a basic Retail DVD without the video and audio being excrutiatingly choppy and jerky. I have a Dell with a P4 3.0 Ghz, 512 MB RAM, and my mobo has Intel Extreme Graphics 2. I keep hearing about this DirectShow thing. Is that something you have to d/l and install? Could the video being choppy have anything to do with that? Also, without getting to 'technofied', what does the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 compare to, a 64MB Graphics Card, a 128 MB Card? Any clues as to why the video and audio is sooo bad would be appreciated. Thank you.

[jimmalenko]

I'd say it's probably an on-board video card. What software are you playing the DVD with ?

[sanjayk]

Are you running too many applications while playing your DVD? That will increase the load on the CPU and you may experience the jerky effect.

[redwudz]

If you want to play DVDs on your computer, you may be better off with a software DVD player. Maybe PowerDVD or similar?

For a all-around plays-anything player VLC Media player is hard to beat.

As far as your playing problems, that may be related to the drive. Some DVD burners (DVD-RW) have their read speed locked at 2X and may have a hard time playing a DVD. Try putting a DVD video file on your hard drive and see if it exhibits the same problem when playing from there. (DVDFab Decrypter can do that.)

I'm not familiar with Intel video hardware, but someone here likely is and can answer your question about that.

And welcome to the forum. You will find a incredible amount of information here. And many good people to help you when you need it.

But you still may have quite a bit of reading to do to get up to speed about DVD video

EDIT: As I think about it, the read speed of 2X should be sufficient. But as others have mentioned, other processes may be running in the background to affect playback. Assuming Win XP, you might check your Task Manager and see what your CPU performance is during playing. If it's too high, that may be related to other processes running.

[dvdnewbie2005]

Thank you for your prompt replies! I have been hanging around reading different posts in different forums, and I would like to say that I am impressed with the contributors to this website as a whole. You all seem to be students and teachers at the same time, and that's hard to do. I do use VLC Media Player, and that doesn't help. I tried playing the DVD as soon as I got to my desktop, so that no other applications were visibly running on the machine. I will try to use task manager and switch everything off then try to run the DVD to see if that helps. Still wondering what the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 chip compares to if any one knows. I bought a 128MB card off eBay, hope that helps things. Thanks Again!

[jimmalenko]

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/eg2/ has some info in regards to that chip.

[manono]

Hi-

He said it's a Dell, so by definition he has a ton of things running in the background, unless he's gotten rid of it already. I would first remove the crap from loading at Startup, and uninstall what you don't use. That preinstalled junk can use up all of your (too little) precious RAM and slow your DVDs and everything else.

This might be an eye opener for you:

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=OTI0

And yours is nowhere near as good as his.

[dvdnewbie2005]

Once again, thank you for the replies. O.K., y'all are right there is a TON of things running in the background. I closed everything that wasn't SYSTEM or LOCAL and it did get the standard DVD playback to a much more tolerable state. There is definitely still little pops and clicks, mostly in the audio from what I can tell, can't really see anything wrong with the video. I also remember reading something about having to set the Screen Resolution lower (something along the lines of 800x600), and putting the Color Quality setting on a different level would help. Is this something that should still be done? In the Display Properties Dialogue Box on the Settings Tab, I currently have my Screen Resolution set to 1024x768 and my Color Quality set to Medium (16 Bit). Do y'all think these settings might be interfering with playback quality? Just a thought. I haven't had a chance to check out the links yet, but I will most definitely do that. Thanks again!

[sacajaweeda]

Here's some good reading & useful tips & info for you if you're really interested:

http://www.videoguys.com/TweaksWINXPVE.html