Stuttering and DVD playback

[Klade]

Hello

I've been using GB-PVR for my living room PVR for a couple of months now. For the first few weeks everything was fine. But lately I have been having some problems. During playback a show will freeze for about 10 to 30 seconds and then stutter on for a bit. Sometimes it will do this 6 or 7 times in 30 minutes. This makes watching things almost impossible. Other times it will freeze the image and the audio will continue playing then the image will speed up to ketch the audio.

The computer its playing on currently is an AMD64 3000+ with a gig of ram and a 80 gigabyte HD devoted entirely to recordings and a Hauppauge 250. The files themselves are fine since when I play them in other programs the work without issue.

I am about to replace that computer with a Pentium D 2.8ghz, 2gigs of ram, 150gig hd that will be shared between operating system and pvr, a geforce 6800 and the hauppauge 250.

My question is when installing for the new computer what decoders should I be using? I used the hauppauge for the first box but obviously that didn't pan out well. Also I kept having defrag issues, can anyone recommend a free program to take care of that? Right now I have my HD partitioned with 20 gigs of OS and the rest for pvr, should I have a third one set as well?

And finally my old box has issues when I play dvds. The aspect ratio is slightly off making everyone look rather skinny. I had to resort to playing my dvds in VLC. Any recommendations on how to fix that?

Thanks in advance for any info.

[sub]

It'll be somehow related to the audio/video decoders you're using. All I can suggest is trying a different combination. Most seem to use nvidia or cyberlink ones.

The aspect ratio is slightly off making everyone look rather skinny.

There is no automatic aspect ratio control during DVD playback, but you can press F7 to toggle between the various aspect ratio modes.

[pastro]

I hope you are using 99.5. It had a huge difference on DVD playback for me. Not sure why, it just did.

[Klade]

I was actually talking about an older version of gb-pvr, glad to hear its been updated for dvds.

As for decoders, where can I get the cyberlink codec. I found a lot of sites that have it in a codec pack but I'm very wary of those. Is there a specific version that I should be getting? Also I heard people on the forum talking about all-in-wonder codec regardless of what card I have. When I tried to install it I got an error because I am using an nvidia card. Is there a specific version for that as well?