PC DVD player weirdness

[chunkolini]

One for the IT boys.
As a family we dont own a TV, killed the last one 15 years back*.

We watch our films on the PC. We are members of the Love films rental thingy.
Most DVD's work fine but some dont. They start off fine, and after a few minutes the sound seems unsynchronised to the film, like bad dubbing, then the image goes all jerky and eventually it gets so bad we have to pause the film. restart it and there is a huge jump in the mage and sound and all lines up again.
Weird and a pain in the situpon.

Any ideas?

Chunko'.

Re TV's, I had just moved into my own place, two days later some rentasuit marches up and tells me I dont have a TV licence, so I fills in the form. Next comes a court summons for not having a licence. TV flies out of the door, kersplaaam. Reccomended as a stress reliever.

 

[Gordon]

IT i can deal with just dont expect me to help you weld it.. yet

Well my experence along those lines have been with copied dvds (legaly to which i own the copy right offcoarse so im not breaking any law) but this only happens if the DVD player is olds, mine was around 7 years old and some of the newer dvds are burned more acuratly (i think) and so when you put them in the older players (the older players lazers are not acurate enough to read the disk) the image and sound can break down.
Now whether or not that is just because in my case my player was old and the copys were poor or just because the copys were poor im not sure. But im going to guess that if you player is old, it just might not be able to play some of the newer dvds because it is not accurate enough, if im right then it should have no problem playing older dvds. if it does then its probebly just broken.

P.s. IF the computer its self is old it could be the graphics driver needing updated to be able to cope with the better images and sounds. Computers now use graphic card and sound cards to do the movies, if they are old or out of date then its possible they are struggling with the newer movies as well.

bottom line.. time for an upgrade.. however if you have a brand new computer then ignore what iv said, its probebly the dvd play is bust

Hope that answers the question

 

[Psymon]

Tv

Re TV's, I had just moved into my own place, two days later some rentasuit marches up and tells me I dont have a TV licence, so I fills in the form. Next comes a court summons for not having a licence. TV flies out of the door, kersplaaam. Reccomended as a stress reliever.

Not able to help with the DVD problem but the TV licence thing I had hassle with.

In 2000 moved out to Russia for 19 months – was teaching engerlish to the kids out there. (Ya angliskii prepadvatil)
When I returned to good ol' Blighty late 2001 - I felt good to be home after a wonderful experience in Moscow.

Within a week of getting back home I had this note pushed through the door from the cop shop. Apparently there was a warrant out for my arrest and I was to phone this number NOW.

So I did ‘ erm, what’s this to do with?’ – ‘Sir you have been watching TV illegally and as you never bothered to turn up at court a warrant has been issued for your arrest’
‘Hmmm, when was I allegedly watching this TV?’

‘Sir sometime at the start of 2001’

Ahhhh I thought – so it’s illegal for a fella to watch TV in Russia without a UK TV license???

Went to court a few weeks later with my stamped passport in hand showing I was in Russia at the time of the offence. All I get from the court was ‘Occasionally this happens Sir – seems a mess up in the office’
Thanks for that – 2 weeks of utter hell waiting to go to court and then a clerical error is the reason for me cr@pping myself with the thought of maybe a massive fine or maybe prison. And yes people in other countries – watching the TV in the UK is an offence people do go to prison for…

 

[MrFluffy]

I reckon your pc isnt quite able to keep pace with decoding the compressed stream in real time for both audio and video streams. You dont notice the odd dropped video frame, but they slowly loose synch until you do notice, then when you pause/restart it gives it chance to catch up with the buffer and resynch.

Id try mplayer as a player, it does almost every video format on the planet, runs on almost every platform, is actually the playback engine behind some of the funky mp3/dvd/avi dvd players you can by now, is faster than anything comparable as its had so much development over the years, and best of all, its open source and free...
You'll need the codecs package too, but thats all detailed :-
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/projects.html#windows

 

[gavuk]

Gordon is spot on need more information on your pc ,is it old /new ,have u defragged recentley?,driver up to date? how much ram installed?do you try and run dvd with any other programs running?have you ever had the computer apart ? could it have a lot of dust in it?my missus's desktop plays up when the heatsink on the cpu gets clogged up with dust..just replaced my drive in the laptop because discs weren't recognised at all,yours sounds more like the pc struggling but need more info. Gav

 

[Drains]

Chunko, what application do you watch your vids on?

I use VLC for files - it can do dvd's too. Very easy to adjust out sync problems with it.

By the way, it's now legal to watch BBC iPlayer programmes on your computer without a license. Streaming through internet, or a digital dongle thingy, isn't legal though.

 

[Benji]

This very afternoon I had the TV police at my door, wanting to know who I was without even introducing himself. I had to follow him up the road to finish my rant at him. Downright rude trying to escape while I'm putting a flea in his ear!.

 

[Wozzaaah]

Chunko', as others have said, it may purely be down to the fact that your pc is underspecced so give us some details of what is actually inside it so we can determine if that could be your problem. It might also be as simple as your dvd drive getting a bit tired, a dual-layer burner is under 20 quid now so it's a really cheap fix if that's all it is. Insufficient memory has been mentioned, personally I wouldn't put less than 2Gb in any system I build now, it costs peanuts, even decent, branded stuff. (Bear in mind, 10 years ago it was around a quid a megabyte for unbranded pc100/133!!!)
My laptop runs a celeron M 410 @1.46Ghz with 1Gb of memory and although quite slow for intensive stuff like video encoding/decompression etc, it runs DVDs with no problems whatsoever, even though it has a fairly poor quality matshita drive in it .

 

[Drains]

personally I wouldn't put less than 2Gb in any system I build now,

Chunko. Take no notice of Woz - he's got Deep Thought sitting in his box room, and he watches dvd's on it. We're talking serious overkill here. He's got more ROM than the Pentagon. He knows how many lace-holes your boots have

Mate, you can play dvd's on a Sinclair zx81 if you've got the right software

 

[Wozzaaah]

Nooo, I wasn't implying you need 2Gb to watch dvds, just that it's now so incredibly cheap its a very simple and worthwhile upgrade for any system .
I'm planning on upgrading my desktop soon, maybe to a quad core. Haven't decided whether to go 4 or 8Gb of memory yet though .

Even with the 'relatively poor' spec of my laptop by today's standards, it has way more than enough grunt to watch dvds and do other stuff at the same time if I so wish.

 

[Drains]

I'm planning on upgrading my desktop soon, maybe to a quad core.

See what I mean?


DIG that hole Woz!

 

[Wozzaaah]

Yeah but, no but, yeah but.......
My home-built dual-core system is now 2 years old, it's practically begging me to upgrade it!
I find it a little slow when I ask it to unrar 4 dvd isos at the same time .

 

[Sparkey]

Yeah but, no but, yeah but.......
My home-built dual-core system is now 2 years old, it's practically begging me to upgrade it!
I find it a little slow when I ask it to unrar 4 dvd isos at the same time .

a man and his toys...

 

[Wozzaaah]

You've got me banged to rights Sparkey .
I do like to upgrade my systems while the old bits are still worth decent money rather than let them get so old even David Dickinson wouldn't have them .

 

[Sparkey]

You've got me banged to rights Sparkey .
I do like to upgrade my systems while the old bits are still worth decent money rather than let them get so old even David Dickinson wouldn't have them .

I must agree with you woz,
If you have the time, money, knowledge to do that...why not?
Just for the fun of it...remember those first computers? 386, 486 all that?
Now that was a pain!!!

 

[Wozzaaah]

The good thing about doing it that way is that you only need to add to the money you get for the old stuff and you'll always have a reasonably modern system.

Anyhoo, we shouldn't hijack Chunko's thread too much, we need to know what system he's running before we can advise further .

 

[chunkolini]

Hi Guys, what language are you speaking?
It is a Dell Dimension 400 from 2004, it does not have a key on the back goes round to make it work, If I remember right it has 256 MB of RAM, a Pentium thingummy, cant remember which flavour.

So yes it is quite old, and was working mostly fine until this problem. Weird that is only on some discs.

We have been thinking of replacing it this year, but currently skint.

Cheers all and thanks for any assistance.

Chunko'.

 

[Wozzaaah]

Spec is fine for dvd playing, it could even be as simple as the processor fan/heatsink is clogged with dust, take the side panel off and have a look at it. If there's dust blocking the fins the processor will run a bit hot and will cause issues. A careful gentle blast of dry compressed air will clear it.
I'm currently poking around inside a 2004 'Iqon' pc which keeps failing to boot, why oh why did I ever make it known I dabble in PC's?

Friend bought me one of these for my birthday, I should wear it more often!

 

[Seano]

why oh why did I ever make it known I dabble in PC's? Friend bought me one of these for my birthday, I should wear it more often!

What you as well Woz, I should have had that 'T' a long time ago.....get sick of people asking.....but I just can't resist the challenge of putting PCW's cockups right.....

Sean.

 

[gavuk]

dust wipes out the missus pc ,could be processor heatsink as already mentioned ,also graphics card ,power supply fan/heatsink,,,this will hopefully cure your problems,may be worth asking on freecycle for more ram and dvd drive though as i see a few offerred round here..Gav