600X in SelectaDock III with PCI cards - Performance Issues

[pkiff]

I am having difficulty producing perfectly smooth DVD playback with full 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound on my 600X docked in a SelectaDock III with PCI graphics card and a PCI sound card.

Here is my system:
ThinkPad 600X (2645-9WU)
PIII 800MHz (upgraded from original 650MHz)
576MB (maxed out with two 256MB chips)
48GB Hard Drive (5400rpm)
Toshiba SD6372 CD-RW/DVD-RW
Windows 98SE

Here is my docking station:
SelectaDock III
3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 64MB PCI video card
Creative SoundBlaster 5.1 PCI sound card
Logitech X-530 5.1 Speakers

When the system is undocked, it plays DVDs completely smoothly, using DVD Express v.5, WinDVD v3.1, or PowerDVD v.4. However, it does not produce anything more than stereo sound when it does so.

When the system is docked, it will play DVDs completely smoothly using DVDExpress v.5, but there is no option for me to use Dolby Surround Sound or 5.1 sound with that software.

When the system is docked and I try to use WinDVD v.3.1 or PowerDVD v.4, I can get good 5.1 Surround Sound through my speakers, but in either case, I get a very tiny skip or motion jerk, repeated at regular intervals of 1-2 seconds in the display. It is more like a momentary slowdown in the video display than an actual skip. It does not make the movies unwatchable, but it is noticeable, especially when you compare to the display I get under DVDExpress (which in other ways is slightly inferior it seems, but which never skips or jerks).

I have tried reducing the system overhead a bit to improve performance, and there might be things I can do to improve this further, but I am wondering if I am just running into a hardware system limitation. Some people have reported previously on issues with the throughput of the PCI bus on the SelectaDock III, and I wonder if this is causing my skips. Maybe I am just kidding myself thinking that a PIII 800 can actually produce clean surround sound and full-screen video off of a DVD?

I have considered looking at alternative PCI hardware devices, but I wonder if this would make any difference. I don't have enough experience with desktops to know where the normal choke points are in audio/video decoding. Here is some info about my current PCI hardware.

The Voodoo 5 5500 PCI card apparently does not have particularly good hardware acceleration for MPEG/DVDs, so I could try to find another card, though I am actually quite fond of the Voodoo 5 and am loathe to replace it (largely for nostalgic/irrational reasons, though also because it will involve testing a variety of other cards until I can find one that works in the SelectaDock III). Here is what they say on Sharky Extreme's review of the Voodoo 5: "Planar-to-packed-pixel digital video format conversion (DVD hardware assist). The Voodoo5 does not support hardware motion compensation, which is a major weakness compared to the competition. In addition to reducing DVD playback quality, playing a DVD on a Voodoo5 requires more CPU power than many other cards" I don't understand the difference between "hardware assist" (which it has) and "hardware motion compensation" (which it doesn't), but in any case, would getting a video card with better on-board DVD/MPEG acceleration improve my performance, or would the max throughput end up being slowed down by other parts of my system anyways?

The Creative SoundBlaster 5.1 Live Digital card apparently does not have on-board decoding of some parts of the Dolby Digital signal and produces an analog signal that then goes out to my Logitech X-530 speakers where it is split out to the 5.1 speakers. I gather than there are more recent sound cards that do more of this decoding on-board, or take a digital stream direct from the DVD without requiring as much processing...or something, I'm not really clear on it. In any case, would getting a sound card with better on-board Dolby/Surround Sound decoding or getting a set of speakers that accepted digital signals directly improve my performance, or would the max throughput end up being slowed down by other parts of my system anyways?

I'm pretty pleased with most everything else the system does, though I notice that when I am playing 3D games, I end up getting better performance when I turn off Surround Sound, though I don't expect that would change with a new sound card, would it?

Does anyone have any insight into how to improve DVD Surround Sound performance or video/sound performance generally in this system? Or some tricks to try in software to get around the issues?

Phil.

[charlieeng]

I'm getting a similar jerky playback of DVD using PowerDVD5 and Media player 10 on a Thinkpad 600E Pentium 3 450Mhz, 256mb, 6X DVD/Cdrom. Switched to an external USB 2.0 DVD Writer/Player using an additional PCMCIA USB2.0 adapter and got the same jerkyness. I suspect a problem with the Video adapter or the IRQ's being shared.

Does anybody have any clues on where to look or fix?

Thanks,
Charlie

[whizkid]

I don't understand the difference between "hardware assist" (which it has) and "hardware motion compensation" (which it doesn't)

Hardware assist means it can decompress the MPEG stream in hardware so your CPU doesn't have to.

Hardware motion compensation... well that's part of MP2, which DVD's use, and it means that part of the stream can say take this chunk of the screen image and move it over here and rotate it a bit. Having that done in hardware saves a lot of CPU.

To take advantage of those things, not only would the video system have to have them, but the drivers would also have to know how to use them.

And I can guarantee that the 600X's video chip does not have either. But even a 400MHz PIII should be fast enough to do it all, and your 600X does it just fine using its internal video card.

Your system's maximum throughput is much more than enough to handle DVD in full quality. Remember that DVD was invented in the early 90's when the Pentium just came out, so all those early players had to have the fastest CPU's they could get.

With a regular slowdown, it seems to me like an interrupt conflict. See if you can use IBM's configuration tool to give the video card its own interrupt.

[charlieeng]

Well I finally got the Jerky DVD video and sound performance fixed!

I added the PowerLeap CPU control panel to reset the L2 cache back on after windows starts up. I didn't notice too much of a difference but another TP600E user who has the same P3 450Mhz cpu said it made a big difference on how his apps ran after turning it on.

I did re-arrange the IRQ's, but that darned Crystal SoundFusion device still sat on IRQ9 along with my PCI NEC controller for my USB and PCMCIA slot.
It helped a little bit by having the Crystal WDM Audio Codec use it's own IRQ instead of sharing it.

Lucky for me the NeoMagic MagicGraph adapter didn't use a IRQ.

At this point it was still jerky but improved. Then someone from work suggested that I use the DVD player that came with the laptop and I said what a great idea. Maybe it'll make a difference.

WOW! What a difference!!!!!

The real problem was the PowerDVD5 Video Codec! It just was too much for my Pentium 3 450Mhz to keep up with. So I'm keeping the InterVideo's WinDVD player after deleting PowerDVD5. Even the InterActual Player that comes with some DVD's played without any jerkyness or dropouts.

I'm a happy Thinkpad user again!!!!!

Next I'll buy more memory to run with. With 256mb memory today, my PCBooster program says I have 99Mb to play with after XP competes it's startup.

Thanks to everyone for your helpful comments.

Charlie

[pkiff]

...I am wondering if I am just running into a hardware system limitation. Some people have reported previously on issues with the throughput of the PCI bus on the SelectaDock III, and I wonder if this is causing my skips. Maybe I am just kidding myself thinking that a PIII 800 can actually produce clean surround sound and full-screen video off of a DVD?

Your system's maximum throughput is much more than enough to handle DVD in full quality.[....]With a regular slowdown, it seems to me like an interrupt conflict.

A couple things to add to this old thread from 2005 for archival purposes.

First, after this discussion took place I did upgrade my sound card to an Audigy 2 and found some improvements with the sound quality, but it did not solve all my problems.

Then, just this week, I tried to install a GeForce 4 MX4000 card to replace the Voodoo 5. The install was not quite successful, but I did have a chance to do some testing of the system with a GeForce 4 installed (before I would run into screen blanking problems). And I discovered that each of the various places where I was witnessing jerky video and/or sound would appear smoothly with the GeForce 4 card. That doesn't solve my issues with my Voodoo 5 install, but it does suggest that the bottleneck problem is not inherent in the SelectaDock itself, but rather a problem with my configuration, and possibly with the Voodoo card or limitations of the CPU. The GeForce has considerably more built-in hardware acceleration and I can imagine that the slow-downs or skips I'm getting with my current config can be bypassed if more tasks can be handed off to the GPU and the Sound Card instead of leaving that work on the CPU alone.

I've created a new thread about the GeForce 4 install attempts here: 600X, SelectaDock III, GeForce 4 MX4000 almost works

Phil.