What does DMA mean??

[PingKing]

I was looking at one of the guides on how to rip and it said "be sure that you have selected DMA on the harddrive that you capture to" what does this mean, cos its says to do this if you are droping frames and it aint cos of my comp its a 1.7ghz. thanks for your time.

[VisiBill]

PingKing,

DMA stands for Direct Memory Access. It is a technique whereby data from a disc drive (or other peripheral) goes directly between the computer memory and the disc drive, without involving the processor ver much).

As far as video processing goes, it means that your processor can spend most of its time compressing (or decompressing) the video and not transferring data to the disc.

In practice, in Windows 9x, you can enable it by going to Settings/Control Panel/System.
Open the Device manager tab and clck on the plus sign next to 'Disk drives'. You should see something like 'Generic IDE DISK' for each of your disc drives. Select the drive and click properties.
Click the settings tab and you shoukd see a little box with DMA next to it. If the box is ticked then you already have DMA enabled. If not, then tick it and click OK.
You may well get a warning from Windows at this point. Windows does not seem to be able to detect whether your disc can use DMA, so tries to scare you off. Provided your drives are not ancient, it is almost certainly OK, so ignore the warning and reboot.
When the machine reboots, you will find multimedia stuff MUCH faster.

Cheers,

Bill.