wirrunna
10th September 2005, 08:07
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.
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.