Sound card choppy while read/write DVD drive

Question

Sound card choppy while read/write DVD drive.

Whenever I play DVDs via VLC, the sound is choppy. Playing with PowerDVD does not have this problem.

I figured it's some kind of buffering problem, so I setup a 10sec cache so that usually helps.

It wasn't always like this.

When I burn stuff to DVD, my audio is choppy no matter what the source (skype audio, or mediamonkey mp3s).

I suspect some simple mis-configuration is going on, as I seem to have similar problems with my laptop.

The audio is onboard audio, the DVD read/writer is in a PCI slot. I'm running winXP.

Was hoping this is some obvious problem, not asking for someone to diagnose it for me.

Answer 1

I once had a similar problem when Windows decided to put the DVD drive into PIO mode, instead of UDMA. You might want to check in your deivce manager which mode is currently active for the controller your drive is attached to.

Answer 2

I suspect the problem is you are trying to write huge amounts of data to the DVD drive on the PCI bus at the same time as writing data to the sound card (on the same bus). I'd suggest you either try to get a normal DVD drive on IDE/SATA or a USB sound card. Either option is very cheap.