Hi, guys! I have a question regarding a problem that's been driving me insane for a little while now. It's about DVD playback on my retail ATI 8500. I use PowerDVD 3, WinDVD 3.1, and ATI's DVD 7.6 player. These all work with hardware acceleration turned on (the ATI's is by default, I'd guess) with the official ATI drivers. But when using all of the *recent* (2 months?) OmegaCorner 9X drivers the hardware acceleration stops working -- I get a blank screen and, at best, I guess to hear what's happening. Otherwise the players are just stuck. I didn't have this problem with older OmegaCorner tweaked drivers. I can't get the ATI DVD to work, and the PowerDVD and WinDVD will work only if hardware acceleration is disabled. Specifics: P4 1.6A o/c to 133FSB 2.1GHz (33'C max), Asus P4S333, 512 meg Samsung PC2700 DIMM, 8500 with 7.004 BIOS, Maxtor ATA133 40 Gig, Plextor 12X CDRW, Pioneer 16X DVD, Enermax 465 PS, LinkSys 100TX. Windows 98SE fully updated. Relative tweaked system. No instabilities or anomalies whatsoever. Does it even after a clean (format c: /u) reinstall and with no OCing. If anyone has any ideas that might help I'd greatly appreciate it. I've become used to the IQ that's sorely lacking with the official ATI drivers, even when tweaked with RadeonTweaker 3.1e... HALP! Thanks! Dave
Figured it out for myself... Don't sweat the problem -- it's complete ATI's. I DL'ed and compared 9021, 9026 and 9031 based drivers -- both reference and the OmegaDrive backups I had. 9021: Hardware Accelerated DVD works *GREAT*. 9026: Hardware Accelerated DVD works, but there's serious dark-area background "splotching" that's horrifying to watch. 9031: Hardware Accelerated DVD is broken. I suspect that the leaked drivers since 9021 have slowly broken and wrecked the hardware accelerated DVD playback of the 8500. The 9031's just finished the job. I'm back to the 9021's, unless someone knows of a later set where DVD's working in top-notch form. Thanks! Dave
