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[shAf]

[apologizing for the cross post to AVS, but I'm desperate ...<g>...]

Last night was my first attempt at playing a DVD movie with my newly built HTPC, and was surprised at the poor quality of the sound ... crackles, pops, poor voice recoginition. It surprised me because MP3 quality has been excellent ... and I even played the Sarah MacLachlan concert DVD with no problems.

I had 3 software DVD players available to me (including MC9.0.180), and the sound was no different from either. What could the problem be? And admittedly, I am new to trying to understand the difference between music and movie DVDs.

I couldn't find a thread which enlightened me, but I am sure this has happened before to someone. Pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated.

Someone had asked about enabling the DVD drive's "digital audio playback" (via the drive's properties). It is currently disabled, and I forgot why I disabled it before, but it seems enabling it was creating problems for CD playback & ripping(??)

system:
ASUS P4PE, P4/2.4Ghz, 512Mb
audio: M-audio Revo 7.1 (analog out 5.1 ASIO mode, newest drivers)
video: ATI AIW 9700P (newest drivers)
Plextor DVD-RW (newest firmware & driver)

TIA  

[JimH]

Someone had asked about enabling the DVD drive's "digital audio playback" (via the drive's properties). It is currently disabled, and I forgot why I disabled it before, but it seems enabling it was creating problems for CD playback & ripping(??)

Try enabling it.

If the drive is set to use digital playback, no audio cable is needed.  If it isn't, it will need to have an audio cable.

[shAf]

Try enabling it.

If the drive is set to use digital playback, no audio cable is needed.  If it isn't, it will need to have an audio cable.

Thanx  

... just for clarification ... enabling 'digital' will cause problems if a cable is also being used ... and it is also a problem if 'digital' is disabled, and no cable is used.  Is there a techical preference ... cable versus digital enabled?  (which is probably a moot point, I don't believe the Revo has a connector for the drive's audio out ...)

[NoCodeUK]

I would guess this is a codec issue.  I had a very similar problem where audio was jerky and disrupted the video.  I found the solution was to use Zoom Player to select the priorities for which codecs I wanted to use and then ervything played fine.  remember you can mix and match codecs from different applications.  I think I am using Ravisent video and Power DVD audio as I found this was the best combo for my system.

Adam

[PhatPhreddy]

Firstly using the internal connection between the DVD and the soundcard is always a bad idea... This slaves the SPDIF stream to the clock in the DVD drive, as these are generally cheap and poor quality (DVD drives are mass produced consumer items with very little regard for SQ) it causes jitter and creates a longer chain of connection in the SPDIF signal chain...

Disconnect the cable and use DAE extraction which pulls the data over the PCI bus asynchronously...

This however is unlikey to cause audio as bad as you have discribed... What DVD player are you using... MC9 is actually a directshow front end to the default DVD codecs that are on your machine (as is WMP9 / Zoom Player / Etc) so establishing the Codecs concerned and if they sound OK in thier host app would be a good step.

PP

[shAf]

My drive is a Plextor 504 DVD-RW, and the problem has been fixed ...<g>...

It actually could have been one of two things ... (1) "digital audio" not enabled, or (2) DMA was not enabled.  It's working well now, and I believe the problem was (1).