I am experiencing an odd variety of crash when I attempt to play more than one DVD in a row on my system. The most relevant system specs (I think) are these:

CPU - Duron 800
RAM - 512 MB PC133 SDRAM
Video - nVidia TNT2 Riva M64, 32 MB, BIOS version 2.05.17.03, driver version 4.13.01.2183
DVD-ROM drive - MT1316B BDV212B, master on secondary IDE, ATAPI interface on PIO 4, firmware version 0.36, 12x DVD-ROM / 40x CD-ROM, DMA active (DMA box clicked in Properties window)
OS - Windows 98 SE
DVD player - PowerDVD version 3 (not open at the moment so I'm not sure if this is just plain version 3.00 or an incremental version somewhere above that)

The essential problem is this. With the first DVD, everything is fine. I pause the DVD to make some video captures/stills using PowerDVD's capture facility.

I finish with the first DVD, stop the drive, then eject the disk using the button on the PowerDVD control panel. Next, I load a new disc and PowerDVD starts running it.

At that point, things go wrong. Specifically, the program first stops responding, and then a few seconds later, the monitor screen literally blacks out - that is, goes to a blank black screen. No picture, no crash window popup, no blue screen, no nothing. It's not a power issue because the power light remains on on the monitor; the black screen is the same kind you get when the monitor is on but the system isn't. The system also freezes at that point, so that I have to press the reset button to get it going again. Once the system restarts and I try running the DVD I was attempting to play again, playback proceeds normally.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this, because it doesn't quite match the symptoms of any other type of crash or freeze I've experienced. The biggest difference, as noted above, is the total loss of a display image. My tentative guess is that it's some kind of interaction among the DVD software, the video driver, the video memory and the system memory that's causing it.

Comments?

-Joe-



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Alternate email: joea64@yahoo.com

If this is a software decoder.
The program may not be cleaning up the temp files between disks.

Does it also crash if you close the program and restart it between disks ?

I hadn't tried that yet, but I will to see what happens. I hadn't been closing down the decoder between disks. I wonder if this may be in some way related to the shutdown problem that Win9x occasionally has when the file cache doesn't clean out completely at shutdown and causes the shutdown process to hang.

-Joe-

Originally posted by Rick:
If this is a software decoder.
The program may not be cleaning up the temp files between disks.

Does it also crash if you close the program and restart it between disks ?



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Alternate email: joea64@yahoo.com

I know more about the way the crashes occur now, but I can't really say I'm any more enlightened than before. I obtained the patch for version 3.0 of PowerDVD from Cyberlink's site last night, installed it, then ran several DVD's again today. I noticed right off that when I loaded a DVD into the drive, and PowerDVD started and I then attempted to access the configuration menu, the above-described sequence of events occurred (the program and desktop stopped responding to keyboard/mouse commands, the keyboard froze, and then the display crashed out to a blank black screen). Also, frame-by-frame advance (using the "T" key on the keyboard) is noticeably jerkier than it was before I put in the patch, and extensive stop-and-start activity caused the program to hang on one DVD. Closing and restarting PowerDVD wasn't much of a solution; I got the error message "unknown file format" when I tried it. Restarting Windows cured the problem - I think it was something in the cache.

Right now, I'm doing the field expedient of launching PowerDVD _before_ I place any disk into the drive, and doing anything I need to do in the configuration menu from there. I'm also going so far as to not just close down PowerDVD between discs, but restart Windows completely; as someone else noted on another thread in discussing PowerDVD, software DVD playback is extremely CPU-intensive and may be monopolizing the CPU to such an extent that it can't run anything else, even the desktop, if something goes awry in the cache. And speaking of the cache, as Rick noted, the temporary files may not be getting cleaned up properly.

There are probably three things that I'll have to do singly or in combination;

1) Get a new DVD drive - least likely. As best I can tell, the DVD player is operating properly. The problem likely lies either in the fact that the CPU is being given an excessive burden to run when a DVD is played, or in the software decoder/player (PowerDVD) being used.

2) Get a new video card with DVD hardware acceleration. Any suggestions?

3) Get new DVD playback software. I think my choices boil down to the 4.0 versions of either PowerDVD or WinDVD. I'm more familiar with PowerDVD, but I am given to understand that the new version of WinDVD has a still-capture utility that is the equal or superior of PowerDVD's, and that's a consideration for me because I like to capture stills off DVD's.

-Joe-

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Alternate email: joea64@yahoo.com