Power DVD & Plextor 40TS

[Keith Mason]

Has anyone had any experience with this combination?

Power DVD V4.0, Plextor Firmware 1.3.

When I try to play a VCD, the program locks up and crashes Windows (98SE).

VCD plays ok under Media Player.

Also when trying to access an Audio CD, I get a 'Audio CD Error 89030000' - 'Unknown File Format'

Everything works fine from my Plextor 12/10/32S.

[Monkey Wrench]

I have a Plextor 40TS (firmware 1.13) but am running Windows XP Pro. I can play VCD's with PowerDVD 4.0 but there does seem to be about a 20 second wait before it starts playing. I do however have problems playing audio CD's with Media Player 8. I get an error message saying that there is a problem reading disk in digital mode. In order to play audio CD's I have to disable digital mode in device manager and Media Player (both must be disabled). The damn thing worked OK under Win 9x/Me. Been in touch with Plextor Tech Support who say that this drive does not support digital mode. The hell it doesn't - it worked under previous versions of windows and I can still use digital audio extraction with Plextools and similar programs. I can only assume that he thought I meant output through an SPDIF output on the drive (which it hasn't got). Not really solved your problem but at least you know that you are not the only person with problems with this drive. By the way both my SCSI DVD and CDRW work fine in digital mode.

[Monkey Wrench]

Sorry, yes I meant Firmware 1.13. Funny, last two motherboards were VIA and I have never had problems with PowerDVD. As for my little problem, all I know is that Media player doesn't work like it used to, ie visualisations etc. disabled. This used to work under Win 9x. It also seems sluggish compared to how it used to be, taking quite a long time to spin up and read a disk. The SCSI adapter is an Adaptec AHA 2940U2W which has XP native drivers, which I am using. I thought Media Player might use dao to get the audio data to process, which it does support. Plextools will extract audio data with no problem. I suppose that I must have misunderstood this, but that doesn't alter the fact - It don't work like it used to!

[Monkey Wrench]

My current motherboard uses the AMD 761 Northbridge and the VIA VT82C686B Southbridge chips. How do you rate this setup, any better or worse than all VIA chipsets. I did have problems with the AHA 2940U2W at first. I couldn't enable the HPT 370 RAID controller and scsi card at the same time. Always caused a lockup during boot until raid was disabled. Solved this one by downgrading the scsi card bios down to 2.2. The later bios won't work. Quite strange that.