Jerky video and chopped sound when playing DVDs

[Willietom]

On my toshiba laptop it just started doing this, when I put in a DVD to play it I get choppy video and the sound is also choppy, I uninstalled the drivers for my DVD-ram drive and reinstalled from my restore discs and still no improvement.
I didn't know what section to post this so I chose this newbie section, let me know if there if more infor you need.
here are the specs on my laptop:
Toshiba A105-4034S
1.8 gig processor
2.0 gigs of ram
100 gig harddrive
Win XP SP2 Home media Professional version

The videos I play are just normal videos, and they use to play perfectly in it, no glitches. Thanks for your time and help.

[Baldrick]

What software dvd player are you using? Try us VLC Media Player or Media player Classic, they have built in dvd/mpeg2 codecs.

[Willietom]

Hi,
Thanks for the post, I downloaded the Media classic player and it still has choppy video and sound, I was wondering if it was because I downloaded DVDFab platinum to my system, so I removed that program and it wasn't the trouble, or at least I'm assuming it wasn't the trouble.

Oh I forgot to answer you on what player I was using: Windows media player 11, I always used that in the past and it worked perfectly, the DVD's would play as good as my home DVD player, but now they are so jerky and the sound has the jitter and sound crackles, total garbage.

[jman98]

I wonder if your DVD drive has changed its setting from DMA to PIO. This could cause the problems you have. The fix for this is complicated. I have some instructions at home for how to fix this via registry edits. That method totally works, BUT there's a catch. You have to be very good at registry editing. If you've never done that before, it's probably not for you. You might get lucky and be able to fix it in the Device Manager by finding the device and changing the setting to DMA from PIO, assuming that is the problem. That method never works for me and it only works sometimes, but you might get lucky. Note that due to a "feature" in XP (yes, those idiots at Microsoft deliberately wrote it that way), it can reset a perfectly working drive to PIO mode from DMA without notifying you in any way that it has done so. It has to do with a timeout value that is ridiculously low by default in XP and once it gets exceeded (it can take almost nothing to exceed it), XP freaks out and puts your DVD or CD drive in PIO mode as a panic fallback.

If your drive is in DMA mode, then maybe you have an issue with a virus or spyware of some kind. Problems with them can sometimes show up in strange places - certain programs won't work worth a crap anymore.

[Willietom]

Thanks for the post, I checked the DMA settings they are good, what I did was I went and uninstalled my primary and secondary IDE controllers and rebooted my laptop, it re-installed everything related to them and guess what, the video and sound playback are perfect again, so maybe somehow by me downloading some garbage program it corrupted the files I uninstalled and reinstalled.
Before I just removed the DVD drive software and re-installed it but that wasn't enough, I had to go to the IDE controllers and remove them.
So problem solved, I hope this helps someone else out too
Once again thank you all for your posts and help I appreciate it, especially for taking the time to answer this newbie

[jman98]

Thanks for the post, I checked the DMA settings they are good, what I did was I went and uninstalled my primary and secondary IDE controllers and rebooted my laptop, it re-installed everything related to them and guess what, the video and sound playback are perfect again, so maybe somehow by me downloading some garbage program it corrupted the files I uninstalled and reinstalled.
Before I just removed the DVD drive software and re-installed it but that wasn't enough, I had to go to the IDE controllers and remove them.
So problem solved, I hope this helps someone else out too
Once again thank you all for your posts and help I appreciate it, especially for taking the time to answer this newbie

This method has been recommended by others and does seem to work. I didn't recommend it because I've never done that. Assuming that I am correct in what I suspect that an XP timeout value was to blame for this, note that your "fix" probably won't fix that potential problem and it may happen again, but at least you know what to do.

[Willietom]

I believe you are right jman98, I do believe it will do it again, but like you say at least now I know how to correct it
Thanks

[Adebisi]

Hi guys,

I'm having problems with my DVD playback (very choppy all of a sudden for no reason on all DVDs).
I've read the suggestion of making sure the DMA settings are correct, but I don't know where to access them.

Everyone tells me to go to my device manager but there is no IDE ATA/ATAPI listing in my manager (I've tried various different views). I'm running WinXP SP2 on a Quad Core Q6600@2.40Ghz 2GB ram.

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Adebisi.