picture freezes...

Well I recently gave a friend of mine my copy of LOTR TTT Extended only to find out that her PC has some wierd problem playing dvds. She uses PowerDVD player but told me that the same problem appears with any other player. A few minutes after she starts the dvd the picture freezes while sound continues to play (till that moment both picture and sound were fine). At first I thought that there was something wrong with the disks I gave her but she told me that this happens with all hr dvds. Can anyone tell me what the problem might be? 10x!

There could be a number of possibilities if she is playing DVDs on her PC. Most important of these issues is that she has a decent video card that is compatible for playing DVDs. From what you're describing it sounds like she may have a bad, or old, video card that just doesn't have enough VRAM on the card. Video cards depend on a substantial amount of VRAM in order to play DVDs at a smooth rate. What may be happening is her video cards ram bottle necks once it's filled to a certain point. Generaly the ram reads what it needs then dumps it once it's finished receiving the information. Problem being that a DVD ROM sends bit information so fast that with old video cards, say with only 8mg VRAM, they are unable to process the information at the speed being sent.

Now days you really need to have a video card that is at least at a minimum of 64mg of VRAM in order to watch a DVD without hickups and freezes. I have a video card with 256mg of VRAM and I strongly suggest the more VRAM you can get the better. Also, the sound is not having the same problem because audio files only need to relay on the sound card and how much total physical RAM on the computer system itself.

It's probably not even a video issue, it's probably that she's got too many things going at once and it's eating up all her system memory. But Tim's the expert, I'm just the DJ ;)