600E DVD Issues - does Matshita DVD need driver?

[crakthesky]

I purchased a 600E 2645-55U off Ebay for a friend's birthday present. The hard drive blew the 2nd time it was powered up, but I guess I would've upgraded it anyway. A trip to my favorite parts place & now it's got a nice shiny Samsung 40G drive in it.

Anyway, this of course didn't come with any of those recovery disks that I hear mention of everywhere else, so I spent the weekend installing Win98 SE, downloading the appropriate device drivers off the IBM site to my desktop & transferring them over to the 600E via CD [I've got a PCMCIA network card 'somewhere' but this was the fastest way]. I think everything is as it should be since under system devices it shows no conflicts or unknown devices, and it all seems to be there.

This comes with a Matshita SR-8171 DVD drive, and the only DVD player software I have is Cyberlink's PowerDVD version 5. When I load that and pop a DVD in, I get perfect audio & the title/format bar, but no video at all. I noticed it says no driver required or not loaded under the tab for the DVD drive, and that's even after I've downloaded & ran the drivers listed under driverguide.com for this drive which doesn't seem to do anything (ATAPI drivers). Inotherwords, I don't know what it should look like in a working system for comparison.

Would someone that has a similar system mind letting me know how they're set up? I see mention that PowerDVD version 4 is preferred for these older models, but I would've thought version 5 would have at least somewhat worked for video. I guess in worst case I could get WinDVD.

[GomJabbar]

I don't know if this will help, but have you installed DirectX from Microsoft? If so, what version do you have? You can run DirectX diagnostics by going to Start > Run, type in dxdiag and press enter.

PowerDVD has a diagnostic you can run. Go to Start > All Programs > Cyberlink PowerDVD > System Diagnostic to run.

I used to use CyberLink PowerDVD 4 on my 600E with no problem.

[MadeInJapan]

How many Mhz is your 600E. I've heard that the slower ones have some DVD playback issues. Mine is 400mhz and has no issue.

[tfflivemb2]

I haven't had problems with PowerDVD Version 5 or version XP.

You can also try using k-lite codecs:
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/K_L ... c_Pack.htm

It's free, and I have used it in cases where I was selling the laptop and didn't have a license for PowerDVD.

[crakthesky]

Thanks for the replies folks. For the record, this was one of the older 300 or 333 MHz processors, and yes, I was running the latest version 9.0c of DirectX.

I took the expensive troubleshooting route & bought a Toshiba SDR drive. When *THAT* also had the same problem of not showing video I downloaded the K-lite CODEC's mentioned below...and the classic media player works great. For whatever reason, PowerDVD 5 still doesn't work but that's fine. The video/audio is about 1/2 to 1 second out of synch, but at least it works. And now with the upgraded drive they'll be able to burn CD's too. Thanks again!