G400 DVD playback questions

[cmoss]

Is it normal to get occasional artifacts (little blips of garbled picture) in DVD movies using the Regular G400 + Matrox DVD player (+P3-500)???
I'm thinking of buying a Real Magic Hollywood Plus DVD decoder card (mainly for Dolby Digital 5.1 S/PDIF output)... does anyone have experience with this card and the G400??
Will the picture quality be as good as the G400?
Thanks!

[LrngToFly]

Not really normal- especially w/ a P3 500.

If your DVD drive is IDE, is DMA turned on?

[Zypher]

All dvds or some? I've seen some dirty dvds do that...usually they blackscreen though. I've seen a few brand new dvds do that, on any player...bad original coding. Usually its with 'recasts' where they take a movie that originally came out on VHS or whatever and redo it to DVD. A movie done from a digital master *correctly* (I'd guess 95 or newer) should be fine.

[booboy]

I've got a G400 and added a Hollywood+ card for the 5.1. I think the image without the card looks a little better. The text on the menu screen definitely looks fuzzy, but when it actually plays, it's not that bad. Of course it's far inferior to my home theater system in terms of image quality. The card is worth it for Dolby Digital. You do have to remove Matrox's DVD player if you add the card. I had a conflict...

[Neturmel]

Just a quick question to you all:

Did you try to play a macrovision protected DVD on a TV-Set with recent drivers ?

I get only a green screen, older drivers (5.11) don't show this behaviour...

[cmoss]

Yup, DMA is enabled for the DVD drive (well, the box is checked, but System Information doesn't report it using a specific DMA). Tried different DVDs too, and they all do the exact same thing... little blips in the screen every 10 secs or so. Maybe I'll benchmark the DVD drive....

I'm rather surprised and annoyed that the Hollywood Plus is worse than the G400 alone... I really want Dolby 5.1 though, and I don't know any other way of getting it (I have a SBLive Value).

Thanks for your help guys!