Distorted Sound on all DVD's

[FZ_Fan]

I am getting pops, clicks and some distortion when viewing DVD's on my PC. My system is two years old and this is a new problem - not sure what may have changed - as I view DVD's very infrequently. I have installed updates to my sound card driver and DVD software with no improvement. I've tried moving cables around to see if RF interference may be involved. Any troubleshooting tips or problem theories would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

LiteON LTD 163 (GH4W), SB Live!, AMD XP1800+ w/512MB, PowerDVD 3.0, ASUS V7700/Ti/Deluxe, Abit KG7 Mobo, Yamaha YST M15 speakers, XP Home

[Action Jackson]

Try putting the SB card on another slot.

There's also a patch for PDVD 3.0. I noticed that the sound output is a bit lower, but allows for the ability to enable hardware acceleration [which strangely doesn't work with my ATI card].

http://www.gocyberlink.com/english/down ... &ProdId=28

I'm using it under Win98SE.

[FZ_Fan]

Thanks for the tip AJ - I'll try to switch slots tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I tried the PDVD XP patch last week with no improvement. Hardware acceleration didn't help either, and took away a much-needed brightness control from PDVD.

Today, I switched the sound output from Wave to DirectSound and got a significant improvement with PDVD (still badly distorted with Win MediaPlayer). Next, I'm thinking of trying a S/PDIF connection so that I can let my SB card do the D/A conversion. Got to find a cable in town first........

[Action Jackson]

Sometimes PowerDVD with that patch doesn't work for DVD playback.

I have to uninstall then reinstall everything and that usually does the trick.

I've done it alot of times over the last week b/c I'm playing around with some configurations.

You can also try ATA100 cables [the extra ground cable might help] and have XP enable digital sounds through that and not through the audio cable.

Good luck.

[Dartman]

If it's just dvd's played through the 163 it might just be getting old and is having trouble reading your dvd's now. Or it might be dirty and need a good lense cleaning. I have a 163 I bought over two years ago and it still seems to work and read fine but my year old 166 started having trouble reading disks and finally wouldn't spin up or read anything, a cleaning did not help that one.
I replaced it with another 166 as it worked great till it died and they're less then 40 bucks now.