Picture/Sound Synch Problems

[Michael Coffin]

Hi Guys,

My home theater is nearing completion (after over 3 years!), so much so that I had a couple of screenings this week. They were both DVD, Forbidden Planet and The Matrix (first one, second one is set for next weekend).

I've got a Pentium 4 processor with 512Meg 333Mhz DDR RAM, ATI Radeon All In Wonder 7500 video card with 64Meg DDR RAM on the card, which also provides the Dolby 5.1 optical feed to the 5.1 surround sound system.

During BOTH screenings the sound went out of synch (near the very end of Forbidden Planet, and twice during Matrix). I use WinDVD on a Win2K Pro platform. I've NEVER seen this happen, and don't know who to suspect as the culprit. I'm leaning towards either the WinDVD software or the ATI video card. Anyone have any suggestions how to debug this problem?

Very strange (and annoying!).

-Mike

[Ken Horan]

I've also had this problem when playing DVDs using my PC as a video server. The problem in my case was the software DVD player WinDVD. I tried other software players and also at times had the sound out-of-sync problem. I switched to a hardware DVD player/decoder card and never had the problem again. The hardware player/decoder was a Sigma Designs card.

I now feed my InFocus X1 projector via component connections from my DVD player and the audio to my stereo system and have never had an out-of-sync problem with this arrangement. I find I get a much more 'film like' image when using my DVD set top player. Using my PC (or my Mac G5 for that matter) produced a more inferior result with motion artifacts, jitter and poor contrast.

[Michael Coffin]

Hi Ken,

My results have been the opposite, the sharpest image with the best contrast and density have been from a PC (not stutter or jitter or video artifacts). The images from several DVD players (using component, composite and S-Video) were all inferior (particularly in the sharpness/focus department) by comparison.

I'm using a Sharp PGM-20X. I think what we're learning is that some DLP projectors work best with PC generated images, and some seem to work best with stand alone DVD players.

I'm just wondering where in the hardware/software chain this condition CAN occur, and what might cause it. Once it starts, it's consistently out of synch until either I restart WinDVD, or restart the computer (had to do that once as WinDVD would not close).

-Mike

[Peter Goed]

Mike,

Are you running WinDVD 5.0 or have you updated to 5.1 - makes just one hell of a difference, especially to your sound output.

Pete.