The VideoLAN Forums

I'm having problems watching DVD's through VLC Media Player and am hoping for some help!

The problem I'm having is when I watch a DVD the sound and vision jumps, as if the DVD is scratched.

When playing through other media players I have no problems and
I have tried to watch several different DVD's and am faced with the same problem although DVDr's seem fine and I don't have this problem with video files that are being played through VLC.

I'm hoping to get this rectified as I use VLC as my default media player.

Can anyone help?

Just noticed I'm a new cone!

The only thing I can think of is that you checked "Increase the priority of the process" in Preferences (Advanced, main page). When the program has to spend a lot of time waiting for a device like a DVD drive giving it high priority means Windows will sometimes force it ahead too soon.

Other than that, I've noticed that VLC MPeg-2 playback (what DVDs are encoded in) is a little jumpy, most noticeably when the camera does a slow horizontal pan. I think the problem is in ffmpeg but I'm not an expert. It isn't what I'd call "like scratches on the DVD" though, it's fairly subtle.

No, that box isn't checked.

Check that DMA is set properly for your drives and "Skip frames" is off in preferences, video.

Just checked preferences again and Skip Frames is unticked.

Sorry, not sure what you mean by check that DMA is set properly for your drives, I'm not very good at this technical stuff!

Go to Control Panel, open System. Go to the Hardware tab, open Device Manager. Open the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers section of the list and look for a name that ends in "Parallel ATA Controller". Right-click and bring up the Properties dialog for this controller. There should be Primary Channel and Secondary Channel tabs for on this dialog, and the Transfer mode set for whatever devices are attached. If you're not sure which Channel/Master/Slave your DVD is on go back to Device Manager, select View/devices by connection, and find your DVD drive under the Parallel ATA Controller.

The Transfer mode should probably be DMA Ultra33 or Ultra66.

I've checked it out and the transfer mode for primary is Ultra DMA Mode 5 and for secondary is PIO Mode.

I can't change the modes to DMA Ultra33 or Ultra66.

http://winhlp.com/WxDMA.htm

contains information about this problem (Windows reverting to PIO mode from DMA).