Wheres my bottle neck?

[connect4master]

Hi

I'm using powerdvd7 at the moment on a dual screen setup. The second screen being my samsung lcd tv. I like to play world of warcraft while watching films from my hardrive or from a disk on the lcd while i play games on the monitor.
The problem i have is that the films only ever play for a few secs before my pc freezes, this is while wow is running. When i just use powerdvd the films play fine no problem, so it seems my computer is not upto the task of running both a game and powerdvd at the same time.
My system is not that bad, so i'm thinking powerdvd must be pretty hungry resource wise. I know that wow takes up a lot of processing power but i'm running a quad core system.
Heres my system there must be botle neck or maybe wow and powerdvd don't like each other.

XFX nForce 680i LT mobo
Q6600 cpu
2GB ddr2 pc6300
8800 gtx
samsung spinpoint 500gb HD 7200rpm SATA
samsung DVDRW SATA
Dell 22" widescreen monitor
Samsung 24" LCD tv

Everything is running at standard clock speeds, drivers are upto date, any help is appreciated thankyou.

Connect4master

[jagabo]

Bring up Task Manager and watch the CPU usage while running either WOW or PowerDVD or both. You'll probably see it's not very high. You probably have a graphics driver problem. Some sort of conflict with video overlay and Direct 3D. Try using a media player that will let you turn off video overlay, or disable it in the graphics driver.

It could be an audio problem too.

[edDV]

What format are the movies? A second PCI/PCIe graphics card could handle MPeg2 decode playback.
Or just use a standalone DVD player for movies.

[JohnnyBob]

I'm running PowerDVD 5 without any problems. When I tried a later version it was obviously too much for my computer to handle with jerky action, skips, freezes, etc. So if you have an older version of PowerDVD, it might work better. Also you might try VLC Media Player ( www.videolan.org). It does what PowerDVD does, and maybe it's less resource hungry.

[jagabo]

MPEG2 decoding takes hardly any CPU time on modern computers. I have a Core 2 Duo and it only takes about 3 percent of the CPU. Even with software deinterlacing and proc amp controls enabled it only goes up to 5 percent.