No video - only the background picture

[principio]

Just downloaded the trial version of PowerDVD.

Installed the latest version of DirectX from the MS website.

Plugged a DVD into the machine. It plays the music swell but no picture, just the background picture of the lady with the shades.

So... looked at the faq. I'm playing on my monitor, not via a coax cable, the colour and resolution are set to 16 bit 600x800 which should be ok, the refresh rate was lower than the recommended so I upped it to 85 (KHz?). Still no joy. Any suggestions?

Can you recommend a way of testing the DirectX installation? It seemed to go all smoothly.

What are the hardware requirements? I'm playing on a P3 cum 256Mb ram at 300 MHz, which is ancient by these days, but I have a cluster of four of them that between them get through some pretty hefty maths reasonably quickly so I have no plans to change %%

[anonymez]

do you have your latest graphics card drivers?

try turning off 'hardware acceleration' in powerdvd settings...

[Taelon]

You didn't say which version of PowerDVD you have, there should be a shortcut to the help file in the start menu, also a system diagnostic utility shortcut. For PowerDVD 5 system requirements are

Intel Pentium II 350MHz or above, or any Athlon processor

Try running the diagnostic and see if it will pass.

[anonymez]

you should be able to play dvd's fine, as long as you have a graphics card capable of dxva...