Video "stutter" on DVD replay from HDD SATA

When playing a ripped DVD from the hard disk, my system "stutters" occasionly with a lot of disk activity. On investigating this using the performance monitor, I found it is memory Pages/Sec that is causing system freezes. My system has 1Gb of ram, and further monitoring and investigation showed the computer is not short of memory but that the various DVD players (PowerDVD, ZoomPlayer etc) I have tried read great hunks of the DVD and put it in memory - memory mapped files. During this process the video freezes and sound stops. Any ideas on how to get the players to replay from HDD smoothly ? Another 1Gb of RAM maybe? DVDs play smoothly from the DVD drive. Further testing has shown that this only happens when the video files are on the SATA drive, replay is perfect from an IDE drive. It appears that when replaying from a SATA drive the system creates a buffer in memory and reads a great hunk of the file and feeds the display program from there until the buffer needs refreshing. It is these refreshes that freeze the system. Replay from the IDE drive results in an almost continuous series of reads and only a small buffer, but perfect playback. Has anyone else experienced this ? The system is an MSI RS480M2 m/b, AMD Athlon 64 3000+, XP-90 CPU Cooler & Vantec Stealth fan, KingMax DDR400 SDRAM 1GB Dual Kit (2x 512MB), Maxtor DiamondMax 10 200Gb SATA, Samsung 80Gb IDE, X-Card, LiteOn 1693S DVD Burner all in an Antec Overture II case, XP Pro SP2.

hi wirruna and welcome to the forum! as you have not yet had a response to your query, i will move this thread to the PC Hard & Software Forum and see if any of the gurus there can help you out. good luck j

Hmm...interesting. I only have IDE drives unfortunately, so I can't test myself. Have you tried defragging your SATA drive? Better yet have you tried creating a partition on your SATA drive to use only to rip and play DVD's from. Make sure the partition is positioned to the beginning of the HDD so that only the first platter is being used. If data fragments from a 4GB to 8GB DVD ISO file are spread out across a 200 GB partition and all the HDD platters, it may be putting strain on the HDD when it plays. I hope this helps.

@wirrunna Have you tried increasing the size of your Page File?

What if you rip your DVD's as ISO files? You can then mount the ISO image with Daemon tools and play it back like a real DVD - PowerDVD doesn't copy any large junks to HDD in that case*. It works perfectly for me with PowerDVD 5, 512MB RAM and UDMA 133 drives. *I never copy DVDs in file mode so I can't tell if this makes any difference on my system.

hi guys! I am having the exact same problem as wirrunna. If anyone have found a solution or can help please do so! My system is : Asus P4C800-E delux 1gig RAm M-audio Delta1010 Sound Ati Radeon 9600 Pro Hdd Maxtor 300GIg Sata