Cyberlink PowerDVD Crashing PC on Fast Forward

[apostrophe]

Don't see any recent threads on this. I've been using PowerDVD for months, longer, (I think it came with my PC), without problems until recently. I've been using fast forward a lot lately. I'm thinking that a bug may have been there all along but only revealed under certain conditions.

At first I though that I had a screwed up DVD so I took a pristine DVD out of one of my store purchased box set collection, in this case Voyager Season 7 D1, and it did the same thing as the "less pristine" one. It only does it under very specific conditions.

Let it play the DVD startup stuff, then play the first title, then fast forward on the first notch, there are little dots on the circle surrounding the main center control. I guess this would be X2. Then let it run in FF. After a few minutes of this, Bang! . This is a bad, black screen, power reset crash. xp recovered but complained about serious error. Oh, also run it in a window (the hourglass-looking icon) . I had it sized for 4:3, about 1/2 size of total monitor size. I feel like I've punished my poor system enough but managed to isolate it to this one repeatable thing.

I was wondering, has anyone else encountered anything similar. I got VLS, which doesn't crash (so far) but I've kind of gotten use to PowerDVD. My PowerDVD is version 6.0.

I've read about people elsewhere having problems with newer versions, so, I don't know, what's a good version? Or if somebody else with the same software doesn't notice a problem under the same conditions...what does that mean? What else could it be? I did re-install the original audio drivers recently after de-installing them. Doesn't seem like that should effect video.

Well, if someone gets a chance to try this. Try to let me know how you made out.

thanks.

[jman98]

There is NO good version of PowerDVD after version 6 in my opinion. Every one since then has been less featured and more user unfriendly than the one before. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that at this point I really don't see what else Cyberlink can do to make it even worse short of making it refuse to play any video at all.

No offense, but your post reminds me of an old joke. A man goes to see a doctor.
Man: Doc, it hurts every time I bang my head against the wall.
Doctor: Stop banging your head against the wall!

I can only speak for me, but I wouldn't have to go through more than 2 or 3 crashes before I'd be extending my middle finger towards Cyberlink and looking for something else. VLC has its flaws for sure and it's been known to lock up or crash, but I've never had it take the whole PC down even when it had problems. I stopped using PowerDVD some time ago because I just got tired of how incredibly slow it was to start to play anything with it, but it never crashed my PC. This kind of problem might be specific to your PC and be just about impossible to track down. It could be some weird driver conflict that most people never experience. You might try contacting Cyberlink about it just in case others have reported it and even try searching for a Cyberlink forum that might talk about it, but the odds are probably low that you'll be able to fix this issue.

[apostrophe]

There is NO good version of PowerDVD after version 6 in my opinion. Every one since then has been less featured and more user unfriendly than the one before. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that at this point I really don't see what else Cyberlink can do to make it even worse short of making it refuse to play any video at all.

No offense, but your post reminds me of an old joke. A man goes to see a doctor.
Man: Doc, it hurts every time I bang my head against the wall.
Doctor: Stop banging your head against the wall! .

Yeah. Only I heard it as "It hurts when I do this" ... "Stop doing that."

I can only speak for me, but I wouldn't have to go through more than 2 or 3 crashes before I'd be extending my middle finger towards Cyberlink and looking for something else. VLC has its flaws for sure and it's been known to lock up or crash, but I've never had it take the whole PC down even when it had problems. I stopped using PowerDVD some time ago because I just got tired of how incredibly slow it was to start to play anything with it, but it never crashed my PC. This kind of problem might be specific to your PC and be just about impossible to track down. It could be some weird driver conflict that most people never experience. You might try contacting Cyberlink about it just in case others have reported it and even try searching for a Cyberlink forum that might talk about it, but the odds are probably low that you'll be able to fix this issue.

I'm looking. There doesn't seem to be much universal love around for PowerDVD around. That's for sure.

I've had good luck with Open Source software and I love the concept. I used to be pretty good with C/C++ and VBA but now I'm way out of practice. With programming on the PC, you kind of need to run to stay in place. Most of my programming experiance has to do with proprietary industrial systems though. I just tried opening a practice project in Visual C++ and realized how over the hill I am now. Still, to some extent it should be like riding a bike. I haven't actually tried getting source to some of these apps but it would be one way to know exactly what you've got and theoretically one could customize their own user interface and so forth.

Now I'm just a little worried that I picked something up after a 4 day snafu with an audio issue which I probably don't need to go into right now. Basically it was like an old cartoon I once saw in a car mechanic magazine. There's this guy scratching his head amidst an array of hundreds of parts from this engine he just disassembled. Then another guy comes over, reaches down and goes "oh, here's the problem. Bad points."
(In the old days, you could pop the distributer cap off and replace points with a screwdriver in about 5 min).

In my frustration I downloaded all kinds of (audio) driver stuff. Drivers are tricky. Hopefully I don't have anything malicious lurking around. There was one post in another forum about windows security getting a little too ambitious about locking out suspicious driver activity (and crashing the system as a "preventitive" measure). If I get another dump I guess I will try note them and see where to translate the hex error codes.