DVD No Longer Plays or Has Problems

[mike1961]

Everything worked great a few weeks ago. Everything still works great if I play my DVD's with Windows Media Player. But, when I try to play them in Sage in the family room there is no sound and only video. Upstairs, I get sound but the vider flickers like crazy. The only thing I can think of is that I recently upgraded to version 5. I'm not sure if that is where the problem is. I tried both the Sage and NVidia decoders and it's the same with both. It worked before.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Mike

[feilerd]

Did you ever find a resolution to your problem?

I just installed the NVidia drivers and am seeing the same thing w/ DVD sound. I've tried just about every audio decoder (and manually specified the right audio renderer)--but still have just silence.

I'm currently playing DVDs w/ PowerDVD to get sound.

[mike1961]

No resolution as of yet - I suppose it could be the NVidia drivers (never thought of that but thought it was the version 5)...NOW DO YOU SEE WHY I CAN'T STAND ALL THESE PROBLEMS

My resolution for that was to use GermSage and it loads a separate media player (Nero ShowTime). Yes, in a perfect world I would not need so many programs and Sage could just "do it all." But, I still love Sage because it's so adaptable and it's not the fault of Sage when most things go wrong but rather it's just limitations in Sage software since you can't expect one program to do everything. So, I have Sage, Nero Showtime, Mame, HIP and all the Sage plugins along with limitations in every program I'm currently using. In spite of that, I still love what it does and when I have more time I'll hopefully be able to find ways around the software and hardware limitations. I'm just glad I'm finally rid of the junky WinTV 500. I can record on my NVidia DualTV at 900 mb/hour and get better quality than my WinTV did at 3.2 gb/hour. But, I was able to use 2 WinTV 500 tuners and I can't do that with my NVidia DualTV. I tried putting a Hauppauge 150 single tuner in but the volume is very loud with that and too quiet with the NVidia. No utopia just yet.

(EDITED: I'm entertaining the idea that just maybe my PVR500 cards are bad - I heard a rumor that hauppauge shipped out a bad batch. Does anyone know about that and if so, what was bad about the batch)?

I'll add that I did actually get the WinTV 500 working with the NVidia card. Then I had a power failure and when I started the server, it no longer would work. Windows would NOT boot up except in safe mode. It's like it was random..sometimes the server would start up and other times it would not. I already tried replacing the motherboard and other cards in the computer so I'm limited now to believing it is either the software or both of my PVR500 cards are bad.


Mike

[gplasky]

Make sure your power supply is big enough (350 or greater watts)and make sure it wasn't damaged in the power failure.

Gerry

[mike1961]

That's a good point about the power supply. I believe it's 400 watts but I have the following in the file server (4 pci slots, 1 pci express):

1. 2 SATA 400 gb hard drives
2. 1 NVidia DualTV card.
3. 1 four com port card
4. 1 modem
5. Flashcard drive
6. DVD
7. Floppy drive.
8. USB ports
9. CPU Fan, 1 other fan
10. AMD 3800/x2, 1gb RAM
11. NVidia Graphics card (pci express slot)

That's about all I can think of but I would think 400 watts would be enough. In fact, I noticed a while back before I had the NVidia Dual TV card that if I did not have the PVR500 cards in the right slots then the moment I turned the computer on it would freeze at the bios (where it would not even do the memory count). So that's when I started thinking it was a mobo problem but since replacing that, I'm thinking it could be a problem with the PVR500 or perhaps just compatibility issues.

Mike

[mike1961]

I'm still having a problem playing DVD's in Sage and I would prefer to play them directly in Sage because Nero has its own quirks playing DVD's. Has anyone found a fix to this yet?

I'm running version 5.0.1.89

Thanks,
Mike

Originally Posted by feilerd

Did you ever find a resolution to your problem?

I just installed the NVidia drivers and am seeing the same thing w/ DVD sound. I've tried just about every audio decoder (and manually specified the right audio renderer)--but still have just silence.

I'm currently playing DVDs w/ PowerDVD to get sound.