Bluray software puzzle...

[Santilli]

Hi

Strange stuff here. On my prior install of XP PRO, I used a HIS 4670 video card.

http://www.hisdigital.com/un/product2-448.shtml

The drivers support HDMI, and, it will in fact output to the TV's rather cheezy speakers through that HDMI connection. I'm using a HDMI cable to connect the TV, and, on a previous install,
Power DVD 8 played Bluray nicely through the exterior Plextor drive.

On the Vertex Turbo install, the software loads the Bluray drive, then says the ATI driver, the same driver I used on the other install, isn't supported, this by either PowerDVD 8 or 9, so,I can't play ANY Bluray disks through the external Plextor DVD/Bluray player.

Plextor sent me a new software disk, still no joy, and newegg.com won't refund my money, even though it's within 30 days, just store credit.

The reason for wanting to use a computer to play the Bluray disks is the really nice Klipsch speaker set that is connected to the computer. If I play Bluray through an external player, and hook directly to the TV, I'll have to listen to the TV speakers, and they suck.

Any ideas, other Bluray software that might work with a 4670 AGP card?

Might the REALLY slow write speeds be causing the software not to work?

Perhaps trying one disk, our, a clean install, might work?

Cant' figure out why the same setup played on the SCSI XP install, which is still there, vs. not on the Vertex drive install...

 

[Stereodude]

What ATI driver are you using?

 

[Santilli]

I just booted off the old OS that works with blueray. Driver date is 8/13/09
Driver version is 8.650.0.

Don't know what the one installed on the raid that didn't work is, since I just pulled the raid array apart to test the drives on different controllers, in different slots...

 

[Stereodude]

What drivers were you trying that didn't work?

 

[Santilli]

XP 8.65-0908131-087120E-ATI was the one that didn't work...

 

[Stereodude]

And you didn't think to download and try the latest drivers why?

 

[Santilli]

ATI AGP cards tend to use legacy drivers. I have the latest version of the legacy drivers, and, the drivers recommended by HIS.

It appears to be a PowerDVD forced upgrade, since moving to PowerDVD 9 Ultra the setup works, and incredibly well. Just feel kind of used after buying the drive and software...
More money then I wanted to spend, but, it works VERY well.

 

[Santilli]

Somethings are rather odd. Sahara had lines through it, artifacts, and wouldn't play, period.
Spidey 3 and National Treasure where incredible in DVD Ultra 9.

Trying to play Wanted, nothing, didn't even really startup.

 

[Pradeep]

Mobo supports usb2?

 

[Pradeep]

What are the connection options for the speakers? Any toslink input?

 

[Mercutio]

Trying to play Wanted, nothing, didn't even really startup.

Download the updates for your BD playing software.

 

[sdbardwick]

Download the updates for your BD playing software.

And firmware updates for the drive.

 

[Santilli]

Download the updates for your BD playing software.

You all have taught me well. Latest firmware, latest, now upgraded to Ultra DVD 9.

I've got Media Player classic HT, and VLC for regular DVD's, and, if Ultra won't play them, the others will.

Also reinstalled the drivers for the 4670 from HIS website, trying Mercs' drivers only, then adding the software. No difference. One feature I do like is the oversizing that allows full screen use with the ATI software.

I'll have to check the speaker out stuff. It plugs in to the motherboard with one of those standard jacks, and, I don't think there is anything else. Klipsch 5 speaker system.

Yes, the motherboard is USB 2.0.

 

[ddrueding]

When I'm using an ATI card, I download the latest from ATI directly. Same with nVidia and Intel for motherboards.

 

[Santilli]

Hi David

I tried that, didn't work.

It may have a bit to do with the bios settings limiting agp memory to 256 mb, with the default setting at 32 mb, when the card has one gig...

More after testing...

 

[sechs]

How about option 5?

 

[Santilli]

Why?
No sata 6 currently for onboard raid. SSD's need that.

When I can max out the PCI-X 133 MHZ/64 bit slot, with a RAID 0, using a 9550USX,
and 2-4 Vertex Turbos, I'll get back to you on if I really need a new system for anything I do...

 

[LunarMist]

Why?
No sata 6 currently for onboard raid. SSD's need that.

When I can max out the PCI-X 133 MHZ/64 bit slot, with a RAID 0, using a 9550USX,
and 2-4 Vertex Turbos, I'll get back to you on if I really need a new system for anything I do...

No, you do not need SATA 6 for SSDs. You want a decent controller and board.

 

[Santilli]

No, you do not need SATA 6 for SSDs. You want a decent controller and board.

Please, I'm all ears....what the F...does that mean????

 

[theSwede]

Please, I'm all ears....what the F...does that mean????

The SSD's you can buy today doesn't need more bandwidth than the 3GBit/s that SATA has available today. They are close but 3GBit/s is enough.

There are some SSD's coming soon that will need the faster SATA standard, for example the Micron RealSSD C300..

 

[Santilli]

The SSD's you can buy today doesn't need more bandwidth than the 3GBit/s that SATA has available today. They are close but 3GBit/s is enough.

There are some SSD's coming soon that will need the faster SATA standard, for example the Micron RealSSD C300..

I'm so sorry. The issue on the table is raid 0, 2 Vertex turbos, and what card can handle that, or 3 or 4 drives.

Seems the best one right now is the 9550SXU.
I'll let you know in a bit if I just bought a card for ebay, or, if it really is 200% faster then the 9000.

 

[ddrueding]

A good controller yes, but SATA6 will get you nothing.

 

[theSwede]

I'm so sorry. The issue on the table is raid 0, 2 Vertex turbos, and what card can handle that, or 3 or 4 drives.

Seems the best one right now is the 9550SXU.
I'll let you know in a bit if I just bought a card for ebay, or, if it really is 200% faster then the 9000.

Well... Yes! And for that you don't need the coming 6Gbit/s sata standard. The present 3Gbit/s sata is plenty good.

English is not my native language and I am not sure if I am misunderstanding you. Please excuse me if I am too obvious.

Your ancient scsi stuff has all disks on a bus. Even if you managed to put 1000 disks on the bus you will still be limited to the maximum speed of the bus (I don't know what you are using, but lets say 320Mbyte/s).

Sata uses a point-to-point architecture. You connect one disk to one port of the controller. The maximum transfer speed per port is 3Gbit/s today. The coming standard will raise this to 6Gbit/s. One controller can handle several ports, each capable of 3Gbit/s.

You can safely raid-0 your two Vertex turbos without being limited by anything. At least on reasonable non-obsolete hardware.

 

[Santilli]

theSwede. OK. My SATA card does about 150 mb/sec. The Vertex Turbo is supposed to do 255 mb/sec. So, that is a huge loss in speed.

The problem with PCI-X is finding a controller card that will handle 255 MB/sec, at least, per channel.

None that work on PCI-X slots I can find will do that, yet.

PCI-X has in theory, a limit of slightly over 1024 MB/sec. One of the reasons I have bought ancient enterprise hardware is that I have found they tend to use chipsets that actually approach the theoretical maximum of the standard they are using.

SATA 3 in theory, will do 300 MB/sec. If the 9550SXU will give me anything close to that, I will be delighted, per channel.

SATA 6 will be something that I would like on a future purchase motherboard.

If these drives are doing 255 MB/sec now, considering the speed of ram, and how fast they system bus transfers data, the sky is the limit. IIRC, David's ram disk ran at 3.5
GIG/sec. Mine did 1200 MB/sec. So, it appears my system bus limitation is 1200 MB/sec.
Hence my desire to transfer data at around 1 GIG/sec for my current system.

I wonder if getting data that fast might actually make me able to use some of the processor power I have...

 

[sechs]

Personally, I'm waiting for QDR support before upgrading my motherboard.

Just because there's little possibility of me actually needing it doesn't make me look really stupid for requiring it.

 

[Santilli]

Personally, I'm waiting for QDR support before upgrading my motherboard.

Just because there's little possibility of me actually needing it doesn't make me look really stupid for requiring it.

That's the same logic I use for buying enterprise motherboards....

 

[Stereodude]

I think someone missed the sarcasm.

 

[Santilli]

I bought 3 commodity boxes, two macs, one Dell, 3 mac laptops, and, the reason was every time I wanted to do something, the hardware, usually a key component, requiring entire unit replacement, wasn't up to the task.

I haven't had that problem with any of the three computers built with custom parts,
and two of those are a mixture of enterprise parts and commodity.

Davids' commodity motherboard is almost 350 dollars. What's the big difference between that and some of the enterprise boards?

 

[Handruin]

Davids' commodity motherboard is almost 350 dollars. What's the big difference between that and some of the enterprise boards?

I'd suspect that a so-called commodity board @$350 is likely to have more features and controls geared for overclocking both in hardware and in the BIOS (more voltage regulation, capacitors, adjustment pots, etc). They are also likely to have more 16x PCIe slots for gaming when compared to an enterprise board.

 

[Mercutio]

. What's the big difference between that and some of the enterprise boards?

The difference is where the costs are. The commodity board will have extra data lanes for PCIe. The workstation board will have support for buffered or registered DIMMs. The commodity board will support far out of spec RAM and FSB timings and voltages, while the workstation board is set up to log a hardware fault when it sees high memory voltage. The workstation board can operate with a serial console to allow remote reboots and BIOS access while the commodity board supports 16 local disk drives. The workstation board has a different thermal profile because there's an assumption that 15000rpm fans are going to be blowing air over it, while the commodity board covers everything that gets hot with a copper heat sink. Workstation products barely have support for sound, commodity boards will have 6-channel stereo and SPDIF connections.

99% of the time, the stuff on a workstation class board just isn't doing anything useful for you.

 

[Santilli]

I'm seeing your point, Sam.

I guess for a while, the commodity end was not important, since most of what I did was not real fancy.

I do wonder what the limit is on the 133MHZ/64 bit slot, speed wise at this point.

 

[Santilli]

Back to the topic:

Now I have most of the stuff up and running on the Turbos, I can't get Power DVD 9 Ultra to open and play at all. I've tried a bunch of different installs, and, no joy.
I've got a retail copy of 9, and, 8, and, they install. I can't get any of them to play off
the Virtual Clone Drive, and, this maybe a setting in AnyDVD that won't stay set, since everytime the program loads on the trial version, it clears your settings.

That would be another 150, and, I'm ready at this point to go buy the Panasonic Bluray player for 150 bucks at costco. Then I have to put up with Vizio speakers, and they suck.

 

[Pradeep]

The problem is any investment in a PCI-X controller will be redundant in terms of moving that to your next build. Becasue PCI-X is basically dead going forward, unless you are going to continue on with an enterprise grade board which may have a mic of PCI-E and PCI-X.

I understand where you are coming from with you experiences with absolutely shit performance from motherboard main logic (Apple, etc), however today's PCI-E 2.0 commodity mobos deliver far more than four SSDs can deliver.

 

[Pradeep]

Back to the topic:

Now I have most of the stuff up and running on the Turbos, I can't get Power DVD 9 Ultra to open and play at all. I've tried a bunch of different installs, and, no joy.
I've got a retail copy of 9, and, 8, and, they install. I can't get any of them to play off
the Virtual Clone Drive, and, this maybe a setting in AnyDVD that won't stay set, since everytime the program loads on the trial version, it clears your settings.

That would be another 150, and, I'm ready at this point to go buy the Panasonic Bluray player for 150 bucks at costco. Then I have to put up with Vizio speakers, and they suck.

Virtual Clone drive and AnyDVD?

How does it work when you have the Blu-ray disk in the drive and play directly from Power DVD 9, with the rest of that stuff disabled?

 

[Pradeep]

If your speakers have an optical input, plug that into the TV, it should output the optical audio from the blu-ray player (with a best case of dolby digital 5.1).

Of course the blu-ray player also has an optical audio output.

http://reviews.cnet.com/blu-ray-pla...-dmp-bd60k/4505-9991_7-33490457.html?tag=also

Panny BD-60 looks good.

 

[Handruin]

The Samsung BD-P1600 also has optical out for audio and you can down sample the sound into Dolby digital DTS

 

[Santilli]

I'm waiting for a Bluray disk to arrive, so I can go back to square one, and figure this thing out. Should be in the mail today, I hope.

Don't feel like renting one right now. Can't get the disk images to load...

My speakers don't have any optical out. They just have a standard, plug into the computer type jack, two of em.

Pradeep:

The controller is pretty good. around 300 MB/sec writes, up to 420 MB/sec reads, with two drives, and write through enabled. It does have two more channels, and, it might be fun just to see what the actual limits of the PCI-X 133MHZ/64 bit slot is. I wonder if Supermicro used a cheap chipset that limits throughput on that bus...

 

[ddrueding]

Greg, just an FYI, write-through is the slower caching method. IIRC, It basically disables the controllers write caching and passes all writes through to the drives.

 

[Santilli]

Got the name wrong, I think. I think it was write caching, not write through.
Came with a warning that without power backup, you can corrupt data.

I think Cyberlink's installer is picking up the install on the other drives, so I reformatted
my other Raid, cleaning it off, then deinstalled, and reinstalled The Plextor BD Suite.
So far, after doing the mandatory download upgrade, I've managed to play a DVD off a hard disk, but, not off a virtual drive iso.

Perhaps only DVD 9 Ultra can do that.

I'm not sure if I want to try the upgrade route now, but, I guess I really don't have much choice...

 

[Santilli]

Turns out the 'upgrade' to 9 Ultra is screwed up, and FUBARS the program so it doesn't even start.

Hope someone starts writing a bluray program to give them some competition...