This occurs only on my PC, not on stand-alone DVD player connected to TV. PC is beefy enough : XP home SP2 running on 2.5GHz P4, 1Gb memory, fast unfragmented SATA disks, HP home SP2, Geoforce 6600GT card…I had Matrox 450 before and the problem was the same. The problem is the same on both DVi connectors and on both monitors. This problem occurs on my own DVDs (created from my own DV footage) and on DVDs downloaded as DVD5 or DVD9 from web. Both Pal and NTSC. It makes no difference if the DVD is played from the DVD player inside PC (Pioneer 108) or as files played from disk. The chopping points are random, every second or two, and never at the same frames indicating a throughput or bottleneck problem. Sound doesn’t stutter. The choppiness looks like a brief pause in video playback, a fraction of a sec, and a picture than jumps a couple of frames to catch on. There are no artefacts. It is most visible when camera pans, horizontally or vertically. I have similar effect in PowerDVD ver 4 and 6, in MS Media Player ver 10 and Zoomplayer 4.03 professional but it is difficult to say if any of those is slightly better in that respect. The CPU load is modest, 20-30 % for PowerDVD, 15 to 20 % for MsMP10 and 6 to 12 % for Zoomplayer on top of regular 20% of other stuff. Memory consumption is small, the graph hardly moves, 50Mb for Powerdvd, 40Mb for MsMP10 and 45 for Zoomplayer. All this is regardless of the screen size. The problem stays the same if I increase the CPU priority to High(13) for those programs. I don’t have AV utilities running in the background stealing CPU or memory, and some notorious services are disabled. Programs are not allowed to use their automatic web updaters. I regularly scan for Trojans and spy software and rarely find anything. I don’t know what I can do to improve this situation, your ideas and questions are welcomed. I goggled extensively and found a lot of questions but hardly any answers. Thanks ayosha
In the meantime I found interesting explanation of the causes of such problems inside this zip here: http://reclock.free.fr/ReClock.1.6.dist.bin.zip I will try this program next. Might report the result. Thanks a