VOGONS


First post, by NickJ80

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I have a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro in my Pentium 166 machine and I recently purchased a Creative PC-DVD hardware MPEG2 decoder card to use with it. The PC-DVD card uses the feature connector of the video card to pipe the video into the video card; the decoder card manual specifically mentions the S3 Virge/DX as being compatible. After connecting the decoder to the feature connector of the video card and installing into a PCI slot, Windows detects the card fine and installs the driver without a problem. The DVD playback software that comes with the card (which seems to be the only software compatible with the PC-DVD) can play back a DVD perfectly fine via the composite and s-video out on the decoder card, but the video window on the computer shows nothing, just black. It seems like the video card's video overlay never gets activated. On a possibly related note, if I don't disable GDI acceleration in the video driver, the Creative DVD player crashes when it tries to play back video. Below are my system details.

- Gateway 2000 OEM motherboard using the Intel 430FX chipset
- Pentium 166
- 64 MB RAM
- Windows 95B
- Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro (S3 Virge/DX) - Rev. B, 4 MB, no TV out, firmware 1.01, using the Diamond-branded drivers (GDI Acceleration disabled) version 4.10.01.0069 with the bundled InControl Tools 95 version 4.03.147
- Diamond Monster 3D (3dfx Voodoo 1)
- Creative PC-DVD - no driver version that I could find, but the date on the driver says 3-6-1998
- 3Com EtherLink 10/100 PCI TX NIC (3C905B-TX)
- Creative Sound Blaster 16 Plug and Play
- and of course an IDE hard drive and DVD drive

Has anyone been able to get the video overlay function of the Stealth 3D 2000 Pro to work? Is there anything special that I should have to do to make it function properly? Has anyone successfully used the Creative PC-DVD card before? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Reply 1 of 4, by foil_fresh

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you got further than I did, my mpeg2 card just wont detect at all. good luck.

maybe directx versions can help? got another PC to confirm if you get the same problem?

Reply 2 of 4, by Warlord

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There is another way. You should be able to use the built in windows 98 dvd player, or windows media player 6 with hacks. You also need to install DX 6 media.
(only works with media player 6)
After installing WMP6 run Regedit and go to (all users):

HKEY_USERS\.Default\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Settings

and to (current user):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Settings

Right-click in the right hand pane ? select New ? String Value ? name it EnableDVDUI. (Double-)click on it ? type yes (case insensitive) in the Value data box ? click OK.
Close the Registry Editor and restart Windows when done.
From now on you can open WMP ? click File ? Open ? select DVD ? finally hit the Play button.
You'll also notice a new DVD icon which pops up a DVD menu when left-clicked.

You can also use the Microsoft free dedicated DVD Player included on the Windows 98/98 SE(U) Setup CD-ROM. Pop in your Setup CD (replace the CD/DVD drive letter if different on your system) and then run:

EXTRACT /A /L %TEMP% D:\WIN98\BASE4.CAB DVD*.*

Now you should see these 5 files extracted into your TEMP directory (default is C:\WINDOWS\TEMP): DVDPLAY.CHM, DVDPLAY.CNT, DVDPLAY.EXE, DVDRGN.EXE + DVDPLAY.HLP. Move the .CHM, .CNT and .HLP files to C:\WINDOWS\HELP and the 2 executables (.EXE) to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM (if you installed Windows 98/98 SE into C:\WINDOWS, otherwise sustitute the folder names to match yours).
Create a shortcut to DVDPLAY.EXE, eventually on your Desktop, especially if you watch a lot of DVD movies. 😀
Note that you also need to install the 32-bit DVD Drivers/Codecs, i.e. Microsoft DirectX Media 6 [4.46 MB, free] or CineMaster, to be able to use ANY DVD player.
DVDPlay is a primitive (lacks custom controls like brightness, color etc), but software based DVD player, and requires a fast CPU (Intel Pentium Pro/II/III/IV/Celeron/Xeon or AMD K6/K7/Athlon/Duron/Thunderbird) for optimal performance.

I believe you need DXM installed for either of these to work.
You might need IE6 installed.
DXM
http://web.archive.org/web/20070103181944/htt … telech/da01.htm

You can also try DXM from MDGX

http://www.mdgx.com/dx.htm

Reply 3 of 4, by NickJ80

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I took the PC-DVD card out of the Pentuim 166 system and placed it into my Pentium II 450 Windows 98 system that is using a Voodoo 3 3000 which also has a feature connector. While there were a few quirks (the Voodoo 3 is not a video card listed as being compatible with the PC-DVD), I got it working there without much trouble. I suppose the next thing to do is to try the Virge/DX in the PII450 and/or the Voodoo 3 in the P166.

Reply 4 of 4, by NickJ80

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And now I've been able to verify that with the S3 Virge/DX in my PII450 Windows 98 machine using the same driver as my Windows 95 machine, I still can't see the video overlay produced by the PC-DVD card. So I'm down to one of three potential issues: the video card is faulty and the Virge/DX feature connector isn't working properly, there is something on the card that needs to be configured to allow for use of the video overlay, or the several different drivers that I've tried do not properly allow for use of the video overlay.