I have an old Dell PC (Dimension XPS; P3-500MHz) running on Win98SE. When I bought it, it came with a Diamond Viper 770D AGP video card and a Cinemaster hardware decoder card. Well, the video card started to crap out on me (still works, but I get a lot of weird horizontal lines across the screen). Anyways, I picked up a cheap (free after rebate) EVGA 5200 AGP card from Fry's and installed it. Well, the new card doesn't have a connector to connect the decode card to it. I can't seem to get the PC to play DVDs since it still thinks that DVD video has to be processed throught the card. I hear audio, but there is no video. I even tried disabling the decoder card in the device manager, but then it won't even play the DVD.

Anyone know how to fix this? I'm trying to disable and bypass the old hardware decoder card since the new graphics card doesn't have a way to connect to it.

 

your machine should be capable of playing dvds via a software decoder....

install windvd or powerdvd & make sure your dvd drive is set to use dma

 

udma mode 2 to be precise

if you can't set it in the device manager, chances are you first need to set it in your bios

 

i'll check the bios to see if i can set it to udma mode 2.....from the device manager, dma is already selected.

i'm assuming windvd and powerdvd are free....i don't want to pay for something on an old computer like this.

 

http://www.videolan.org/