Slow Playback with PowerDVD 3 & 4.0 (Pioneer DVR-A03)

[digitalhecht]

I've had this burner for a while. I seem to remember store bought DVDs playing on it fine when I first bought it. I threw in a few different discs this evening to find playback slow. So I uninstalled 3.0, upgraded to 4.0. Same problem. Any suggestions?

[pacoreguenga]

First of all, check the mpeg filters you have installed on your system, and your graphic card drivers. Make sure they all are the latest versions. (have you installed the ivivideo.ax and iviaudio.ax software mpeg components? They slow down performance. Also check for any encoder you have added recently, check for duplicated filters, and every mpeg stuff you have installed. If your system defaults to software playing rather than hardware, it will slow down. Have you installed an ac3 software decoder lately? That may be the cause.
Antivirus suff, servers, daemons, skins, sounds and every bell and whistle added to the system all degrade system overall performance.
If you are sure your software portion is working flawlessly, check the hardware side:
Check under device manager the kind of transfer method you are using with your drive. If it says "pio mode" change it to DMA. If it says DMA, change it to PIO.
If that doesn't work, uninstall and reinstall your drive (under device maganer, not phisically)
By the way, have you upgraded your firmware? That also changes settings.
Check for loosen cables, tighten all of them. Try using your burner without another drive on the IDE chain.

If nothing works, reformat your hard drive and reinstall your OS.

OK?