DVD playback stutters

Sconsey

Hi,

Hope this is the right forum....

Was looking at a friends PC the other day, he has a problem with the DVD playback, it stutters. He said he may have deleted some things off the machine recently that could be the problem

Anyhow, try to play a DVD in media player and it comes back saying it cannot find the correct codec, which is a bit weird as I thought that would be a standard codec with WMP. I installed VLC, checked that it supported .vob files and when I play the DVD it stutters very badly, I doubt it's a codec problem at all since it can play the file (it just plays it badly).

I would guess it's a hardware problem, maybe the hardware is not up to the task, but my friend says his PC used to be able to play DVD's just fine so am stumped.

Any ideas what might be causing this?

Thanks

tman

VLC uses its own codecs though afaik (was never really a fan of it, so can't comment), so it does kind of sound like a codec issue...

I'd say grab a codec pack which includes a DVD decoder (k-lite codec pack etc...)

stylers

check that the DVD drive controller hasn't dropped back to PIO mode, it should be using DMA (UDMA) . look at the secondary drive controller properties in the device manager.. sometimes windows will permanently mess up the controller I/O mode when it tries to read a bad disc..

Capt'n Midnight

if someone admits they deleted stuff then system restore should be your first port of call , though asking them when it last worked can lead to a story of what they did inbetween

Sconsey

Great, thanks for the replies. I'll try the drive controller, k-lite, and system restore in that order