best dvd player for pc

[greymalkin]

Hello All,
As you may or may not know, I have successfully combined all 3 back to the future movies, cutting out all the credits and splicing them to get 1 5:17.01 film. The problem now is that it is approx. 8.6 gb and I have not found a good way to author/burn to 9gb media as of yet.

I am wanting to have a "back to the future" party at my house and invite people over to watch. I have a regular (non-hdtv) 27" television and have my computer connected to it via s-video cable for the video and spdif out from my audigy 2 ex for the audio.

Here is my dilemma. The first issue I have is that a couple times during the movie it kinda "hiccups" on me..the video might speed up for a split second then normalize. I have a pretty stout machine (3ghz/1gb DDR400 Ram/WD Raptor in RAID0). The weakest link I suppose would be my ATI AIW 9000 64mb card. I considered a couple reasons it might be doing this. 1 is the bitrate for the video alone is 9800kb/s. The audio adds an additional 448kb/s. So I figured this might choke even a monster machine (I do have it authored as a dvd so it's not loading the whole mega 8.6gb file at once). I suppose for this issue I was wondering if there is a particular software player that can handle playing dvd's off the hard drive better than others. I am using powerdvd 5 right now.

Second, when I watch the DVD on my tv the colors aren't right. The reds are too bright. I'm hoping one of the different color settings will fix this.

Lastly, I was wondering just how much cpu load it takes to decode the DD 5.1 stream in software. Right now it's decoding it and I suppose mixing it down to stereo. I just figured out a few minutes ago how to tell the sound card to just do a direct dump straight to the external receiver. I'm hoping perhaps this will fix the "bottleneck". So maybe this will solve my problems..just wanted to run it all by you guys and see if anyone had any wonderful suggestions for a different dvd software player.

[yoda313]

Hello,

Tried zoom player????? There are others in the TOOLS section too.

Good luck.

[greymalkin]

Thanks!
As long as it supports spdif passthrough it'll be fine i'm sure.

[yoda313]

Thanks!
As long as it supports spdif passthrough it'll be fine i'm sure.

Hello,

Hmm... don't know. You'll have to check the faq for it...

Best of luck

Kevin

[greymalkin]

i sure will. if not i'll try it with powerdvd..the load taken off for not having to decode the dd5.1 might be enough to keep it from the hiccups and the different color profiles might fix the bright reds!

[jimmalenko]

Hello All,
As you may or may not know, I have successfully combined all 3 back to the future movies, cutting out all the credits and splicing them to get 1 5:17.01 film. The problem now is that it is approx. 8.6 gb and I have not found a good way to author/burn to 9gb media as of yet.

1 is the bitrate for the video alone is 9800kb/s. The audio adds an additional 448kb/s.

Sorry to be nitpicking, but do you mean that the max bitrate is 9800 (using 2-Pass VBR I assume) ?