Required Hardware For Watching DVD's

  • Thread starter Thread starter Robert Nurse
  • Start date Start date
R

Robert Nurse

Hi All,

I'd like to watch DVD movies on my PC. What specs do I look for in a
good drive? What other hardware do I need in order to watch DVD
movies?

TIA
 
Robert said:
Hi All,

I'd like to watch DVD movies on my PC. What specs do I look for in a
good drive? What other hardware do I need in order to watch DVD
movies?
Click to expand...

All you really need is a DVD drive, a video board, and a sound board. Fine
points--there are DVD drives that can be flashed "region free" if you plan
on obtaining DVDs from outside of whatever part of the world you live in,
and if your CPU is slow you might want to consider an accelerator board
such as the RealMagic Xcard.

Beyond that, look at the software bundle and read up on the player software
that's provided--if the drive includes a good player then it might be worth
paying a bit more than for one that is going to require you to buy a
different player.

Beyond that, they pretty much all work for playing DVDs.
 
Thanks. I've got all these already. Here's my system spec:

Here's my system:

AMD Thunderbird 850
512MB SDRAM
Windows 2000
GeForce 4 Ti 4200/128Mb
Sound Blaster Live

Acceptable? Do you have any player software recommendations?
 
Robert Nurse said:
Thanks. I've got all these already. Here's my system spec:

Here's my system:

AMD Thunderbird 850
512MB SDRAM
Windows 2000
GeForce 4 Ti 4200/128Mb
Sound Blaster Live

Acceptable? Do you have any player software recommendations?
Click to expand...


Robert,

Go into Device Manager, and check the Primary or Secondary IDE channel
(whichever your DVD drive is on), and under the Advanced tab, make sure that
your DVD drive is showing "Use DMA if possible" and the setting under that
is "UDMA" and not "PIO". Otherwise, the video playback will be "jittery".

Jim
 
Ohaya said:
Robert,

Go into Device Manager, and check the Primary or Secondary IDE channel
(whichever your DVD drive is on), and under the Advanced tab, make sure that
your DVD drive is showing "Use DMA if possible" and the setting under that
is "UDMA" and not "PIO". Otherwise, the video playback will be "jittery".

Jim
Click to expand...

Hi,

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I'm running a system with an Athlon
under-clocked to 950, with an "old" Creative 2x DVD player, and DMA is
enabled, and it plays back fine.

Also, I don't remember which exactly which video card I have in it :), but
it has a video out, which I don't use, and I had a bit of a time with
playing DVDs for awhile because the DVD software I'm using (PowerDVD) kept
thinking that the video out was enabled, and then not allowing me to play
the DVD (because of copyright/protection). I finally found an older driver
that got it working.

Jim
 
Robert said:
Thanks. I've got all these already. Here's my system spec:

Here's my system:

AMD Thunderbird 850
512MB SDRAM
Windows 2000
GeForce 4 Ti 4200/128Mb
Sound Blaster Live

Acceptable? Do you have any player software recommendations?
Click to expand...

Should be fine. The only real gotcha is that if the board has S-video or
composite out nvidia has gone a bit overboard on enforcing Macrovision and
you may not be able to use hardware acceleration with the most recent
drivers. As for player software PowerDVD, WinDVD, and the nvidia player
all work fine.
 
J. Clarke said:
Should be fine. The only real gotcha is that if the board has S-video or
composite out nvidia has gone a bit overboard on enforcing Macrovision and
you may not be able to use hardware acceleration with the most recent
drivers. As for player software PowerDVD, WinDVD, and the nvidia player
all work fine.
Click to expand...

I just picked up a DVD-ROM (Benq) that came with WinDVD 4.0. I
installed the drive and the software and I was watching DVD's that
night! Thanks for all your input.
 
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