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**xortam** · 29 January 2001, 13:17

All three elements must match your video standard (NTSC or PAL) ... DVD encoding, TV capability/setting, video driver settings. Assuming you're using a G4xx card, check your TV standard setting under the DualHead tab of your Advanced Display Properties.

**Indiana** · 29 January 2001, 13:53

This is a known problem with Matrox' DVDMax, which seems to be optimised for NTSC, thus leading to jerky playback on PAL systems. On the monitor, everything is running smooth, just on the TV you'll get this jerky movement.

Take a look at the Matrox DVD/TVOut forum, it is full with threads about this problem - in fact the whole forum seems to consist mainly of posts covering the three big driver quirks:
1. DVD playback on PAL systems is jerky
2. No Overlay is used for MPEG4 when the screen width is not a multiple of 32
3. Other Overlay restrictions introduced with PD6 (e.g. no overlay on the secondary output)

Your best bet would be to install PD5.52 - this is said to have the least "jerkiness" when Playing DVDs on PAL - plus it enables the overlay-support on the secondary out in Clone-mode again that was dropped in PD6.

EDIT: After looking at the Matrox Forum for a while I really had to wonder if it would not be less work for M to simply fix those three bugs than to have their tech-support play the same game everytime a new user posts with one of them. "The same game" means asking for complete machine details up to a level that quite some users are not capable of providing, make them reinstall the whole system, install lots of VIA/.../... driver upgrades, and many other things to try to scare them away until there is someone posting that this is in fact a known problem.

[This message has been edited by Indiana (edited 29 January 2001).]

**dZeus** · 29 January 2001, 18:34

1. that is system specific, because whatever I try, I can't reproduce it on my system... I'll try again tomorrow, but I don't think i'll find anything, because I've tried a lot before...

2. that can only be fixed by MS, not by Matrox. The reason why it doesn't use overlay is because of the G400 chip design, that has been made with Dualhead in mind (and DVD-MAX). MS can fix their codec to use overlay on the G400. (as far as I understand this problem).

3. as I said before... what would be the best thing for Matrox to do, if the G450 couldn't display overlay in clone mode, but the G400 could? right, disable it on both. Not that this is actually happening, but if it would be the case, what would be your answer?

**Indiana** · 29 January 2001, 22:14

Originally posted by dZeus:
1. that is system specific, because whatever I try, I can't reproduce it on my system... I'll try again tomorrow, but I don't think i'll find anything, because I've tried a lot before...

It's not really system specific, if you take a look at the various and very different systems that this is occuring on. All of them easily being fast enough for smooth playback of any DVD (which they do on the monitor, just not on the PAL TV).
Besides Matrox aknowledges this problem (even in the newer driver-readmes) and the problem varies more with different drivers than with different systems.

2. that can only be fixed by MS, not by Matrox. The reason why it doesn't use overlay is because of the G400 chip design, that has been made with Dualhead in mind (and DVD-MAX). MS can fix their codec to use overlay on the G400. (as far as I understand this problem).

If that would be the case then you should warn anyone about using the G4x0 line of cards if he wanted to do anything with the MS MPEG4 and/or DivX ;-) codecs .
But I don't believe that it's really a hardware limitation (I never saw Matrox tech support claim this) and if it was I think it would still be quite easily fixable in the drivers by making them think the movie was a width of 32.
Those clips play nicely on any of the competitors cards so it's a bit hard for Matrox to blame the codec. If they are waiting that MS fixes this just for them (when ATI, 3DFx, NVidia,...) don't have this problem they can most probably wait forever.

3. as I said before... what would be the best thing for Matrox to do, if the G450 couldn't display overlay in clone mode, but the G400 could? right, disable it on both. Not that this is actually happening, but if it would be the case, what would be your answer?

First why should the G450 not be able to produce overlays on the secondary in Clone mode? If it couldn't output overlays on the secndray AT ALL I would understand this as a hardware limitation (this however would render the TVOut quite useless), but with DVDMax the video does play with Overlays on both, the primary and the secondary so they must be possible.

And even if the G450 had this major design-flaw this still wouldn't be a reason for dropping support on the G400 (that I know is capable of this) as well.
This would be kinda like if a car manufacturer deliberately limited the speed of one of their older cars just because their newer el-cheapo one made for the mainstream-market was slower - or to say it in other words: it would be just plain stupid.
Hmm, maybe that's why the newest drivers seem to have a negative impact on speed for many users, maybe Matrox is following your advice and crippling the speed of the G400 down to that of the G450...

**magick** · 30 January 2001, 09:31

Number 1. seems to be a DirectShow problem.
I can't reproduce the jerky PAL playback with the old cinemaster (99/98) which doesn't use DirectShow but with WinDVD and PowerDVD which register DirectShow-Filter.
Maybe there's the problem.

**xortam** · 30 January 2001, 10:40

Von_Acid ... did you double check your settings like I posted earlier? Your problem may be a simple one rather than the issues that are being discussed here. Have you tried the Cinemaster DVD player which ships with the G4xx card? Which graphics card are you using?

**dZeus** · 30 January 2001, 14:52

I must admit I read a lot of bug reports on PAL video content stuttering on PAL TVs over here and on the Matrox Tech Support forum, and I've done some more testing.

Number 1. seems to be a DirectShow problem.
I can't reproduce the jerky PAL playback with the old cinemaster (99/98) which doesn't use DirectShow but with WinDVD and PowerDVD which register DirectShow-Filter.
Maybe there's the problem

This could be the case. I've tested some DivX PAL content, and when playing back, I get 0 dropped frames most of the time, but every so many minutes, the output on the tv-out drops a lot of frames for a period of about 10 to 30 seconds, after which it returns to perfectly fluent again. Playback remains fluent on the monitor all the time, and CPU load never reaches above 80%, even during the stuttering. Now that I've been able to reproduce it, I'll look further into it, and try to determine if DirectShow is the culprit. I doubt so, because DVD-MAX fetches the overlay information, and what program with what method produces the overlay wouldn't make a difference to DVD-MAX as I would logically conclude. However, I don't know enough about the working to be certain on this

[This message has been edited by dZeus (edited 30 January 2001).]

**xortam** · 30 January 2001, 17:33

Have any of you tried checking your HDD throughput during these stutters? Have you tried some of the disk optimizations to see if they have any effect? Presumably, you've been careful about not allowing background tasks from stealing performance.

**dZeus** · 30 January 2001, 18:03

I'm playing back from CDROM, and during _all_ of the stutters, the output on my monitor is NOT stuttering, while it is no the tv. As I said, CPU utilisation never goes above 80% when I tested this, not even with the stutters.

[This message has been edited by dZeus (edited 31 January 2001).]

**xortam** · 30 January 2001, 18:23

Seems obvious that it isn't a device throughput problem if you're getting stutters on the TV output, but not on the monitor. We still don't know what Von_Acid's exact situation is but this thread has become focused on this "overlay defect". I'll bow out since I don't have any experience with that problem.

**Grego** · 31 January 2001, 01:02

I have the ezact same problem as dzeus, perfect playback on the monitor and framedrop on the tv (pal). Rather annoying actually. For me this happens with the cinemaster engine supplied with the g400 as well as cinemaster2000, although there is less framedrops on the older version.

**prr** · 2 February 2001, 07:09

2. that can only be fixed by MS, not by Matrox. The reason why it doesn't use overlay is because of the G400 chip design, that has been made with Dualhead in mind (and DVD-MAX). MS can fix their codec to use overlay on the G400. (as far as I understand this problem).

I do not agree with You and understand the problem differently.
First, if this were a problem of MS, like the stupid DualHead resolution restriction of W2k, Matrox would have said it. Instead they just say, that the problem is under investigation. I have directly asked many times this question in Matrox forum and the best I have got, is "under investigation" and "codec dependent" and “low priority”. How long can one investigation last?!?
If Matrox would say, that Yes, it is a MS problem, users would start bombing MS with complains and if then turns out, that it is still Matrox case, it may have some serious consequences for Matrox. Please be aware that currently Matrox G400 is in MS media 7 recommended list!
So my conclusion is that this is purely Matrox problem.

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