Hi jkwaterman,

Your PC is very well specified to play DVD and BD. What type of video files stutter ? All, DVD, DVD + BD ?

From my understanding of your post the problem is stuttering video and stuttering audio, is this correct ? Is it at the same time or audio fine and video stutter etc.

Something interesting you mention is when you disable the onboard audio driver PowerDVD will hang. If you open PowerDVD and choose default audio device (rather than specifying) then disable the oboard audio device and set the ATI one as default does that work ?

I've been using various ATI cards for a few years now and there have been some setup issues. For example I owned an ATI 2450 card and upgraded to ATI 3450 and thought as the drivers were generic it would all just work but I was wrong. What I had to do was re-install the ATI 2450, remove the drivers, install the ATI 3450, load the drivers from the manufacturers CD and then update them from the ATI web site (putting the ATI drivers straight from the web site without installing them from the CD first didn't work).

With the latest drivers (11 (not tried 11.2 which was released yesterday)) I've found that I didn't even have to load the realtek driver, the one that comes with the ATI package seems to be robust.

Unfortunately working through these issues tends to be a methodical process of experimentation noting down tested permutations until a setup works.

Before you go through the process of working out your issue I'd always recommend downloading the latest version of PowerDVD (from the Cyberlink web site menu Support then Software Update) and running the Cyberlink BD advisor (from the from the Cyberlink web site menu Support then BD advisor).

My PC is a Shuttle SP45H7 which also has an onboard audio solution and this needs to be disabled in the BIOS otherwise Windows sometimes decides this is the primary audio device (no idea why). If it's of any use I will take note of my settings and post them, let me know if you want me to do this.

OP, I noticed you have the 64 bit version of Win 7. You also have 8Gb of RAM. There is a known issue with the 64 bit Win7 that it cannot properly allocate that much RAM. I found in the Windows forum that if you manually lower your amount of RAM below 4Gb in the system configuration tool, your audio will work fine. Kind of sucks for those of us with a lot of RAM, but until we get a fix from Microsoft, we'll SOL.

I'm off to work, but this evening I'll try and find the link about the issue.

@jkwaterman

please check this posting and provide as many info as possibel, it will help to better understand the envrionment

http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/8449.page

Br
Michael Technical Support

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I think I fixed the problem. I bit the bullet and did a complete clean install of the windows 7 64 bit OS and I reinstalled all the ati drivers from scratch. I figured I had a corrupted or improperly installed ati driver that I couldn't back out. IT seems to work. I turned off the on board audio and cyberlink powerDVD starts properly and there has been no stuttering in over 20 reboots. As for the person that said that 64 bit windows can't handle 8 GB of ram, you are wrong. It is 32 Bit windows that can't handle over 4 GB. I have been a computer professional for many years and I have never heard of any reports that a 64 bit OS not being able to handle more than 4 GB of ram and the includes windows and MAC

Hi jkwaterman, glad you fixed your problem, a complete re-install is brutal but sometimes the way to go.

4Gb of RAM; direct access to memory above 4Gb of RAM is generally not possible on a 32bit Windows operating system but entirely possible when using PAE/AWE otherwise how do you think a 32bit O/S could run with a large amount of memory in a data centre !

4Gb of RAM; you can only see 3-3.5Gb of usable RAM, this is because Windows needs memory for the devices you have on your PC. The less actual usable RAM you have the more devices you have (or more memory required by those devices). Way back in time the memory stack used to be fixed, for example Hercules graphics cards would be known to be at address B0000/B8000 so developers could use those addresses. Today things aren't so simple, there is a vector stack in Windows allowing devices to be re-located in memory but it doesn't generally matter as a developer will be programming against an API.

4Gb of Virtual RAM; is available to a Windows 32bit process (2Gb user/2Gb system) although this is theorectical as 4Gb RAM may not be installed (in fact until a few years ago 2Gb RAM was regarded as quite a lot).

Hope that helps clarify.