Help! System freezes when playing DVD through ATI TV-out.

Factual Questions
1

Okay, so I gots me a cheapie DVD-Rom drive and a stack o’ media.

Problem is-- I have a pitiful 14" monitor. Usually, when I watch (VCD or DivX) movies on the computer, I watch 'em on a 27" TV through the medium of my ATI All-in-Wonder video card. It’s an oldish one-- an AGP version with the RAGE chipset.

When I try this with the DVD player software that came bundled with the drive, (CyberLink PowerDVD) it’ll start to play the DVD, but quickly lock up. CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the task manager shows this software as not responding, and I can’t even shut it down-- needs a cold-reboot. (Everything works fine if the TV-out is not enabled.)

This is driving me nuts.

Two questions:

  1. Has anyone had this problem before, and found a solution?
  2. Can anyone point me in the direction of some decent free DVD software so I can do the trial-and-error thing?

So, pertinent details:

OS: Windows Me
Video: ATI All-in-Wonder 128 AGP
Offending software: Cyberlink PowerDVD player

Any help would be appreciated!

PS- I’m well aware that once I convince the cussed thing to get along with my TV-Out card, I’m likely to have Macrovision problems-- I’ve done a little preliminary research & don’t expect this to be a serious hassle. Please don’t offer any advice about it in this thread-- although my intent is just to watch the movies I’ve invested so much dough in on a decent screen, there’s no need to talk about stuff that would have the by-product of defeating copy-protection. Thanks!

2

Maybe totally unrelated - but I had this problem on my machine: it’s a Dell laptop with a TV out, which I wanted to use for DVDs. Every time I tried playing a DVD and activating the TV Out - Bam! Bluescreen. The only fix I found was to go into display properties (right click desktop | Properties | Settings | Advanced | Displays), enable the “TV” display and set it as primary. Then back out of that, play the DVD using the DVD player. Then it works fine for me (as long as I don’t dare change displays, or knock the cable, or breathe, any of which cause a bluescreen. It’s hard holding your breath for “Magnolia”, I can tell you.)

For free DVD viewing software: how about Windows Media Player?

3

Be sure your Tv is ON first, before you turn on the computer cause thats what ATI says.