The following is an e-mail I sent to the manufaturer of an MPEG card I purchased today:

START

I purchased today a Liteon 16x DVD and a VF64-DVS DVD MPEG card with accompanying software.

Since installing the DVD as a Slave on the Secondary IDE controller and installing the REALMagic Hollywood Plus Software I have countless problems with stability. I've tried it as a slave on the Primary IDE too.

The first issue is that the operating system cannot find a suitable driver for what it calls a Multimedia Controller and indicates it as being an unknown device. I've searched the disk that comes with your product and the disk that came with the DVD, though I doubt that the DVD has anything to do with the Controller in question. I downloaded the latest Win NT drivers from your site. Tried the setup.exe, but nothing works and consequently Windows disables the Controller.

I can play the DVD using software that came with the DVD, but it is very jerky. I want to use the MPEG card so that I can output to a television.

If I try and run the  REALMagic Hollywood Plus Software my computer automatically reboots.

I am downloading the latest version of DirectX 8.1 for my operating system as I write with the hope that this will resolve the reboot issue, but I suspect that if I cannot get the driver working for the Multimedia Controller, the problem will persist.

My computer configuration is as follows:

VA6 Motherboard with onboard sound - though I have connected the output to a Stereo as well as trying the internal system which has a separate amplifier.
Motherboard has 5 PCI slots
Celeron 466 MHz CPU
256 Mb RAM
S3 AGP Video Card 4 Mb
10 Gb Fujitsu HDD (2.6 Gb of free space)
Acer CDRW
Currently using DirectX 8.0
Windows 2000 with Service Pack 2

Your specifications for the card are:

IBM PC or 100% compatible computer
Pentium 233 MHz or higher processor
32 MB of RAM (32 MB recommended)
2x PCI 2.1 compliant expansion slot
10 MB available hard disk space
256-colour VGA video or better
Windows 95/98/NT/2000 operating system
Enhanced IDE connector
Amplified stereo speakers or headphones
    (DolbyDigital or Dolby ProLogic speaker required for surround sound)
CD ROM drive
Microsoft DirectX version 5 or later

This computer is normally extremely stable and the issues have only occurred since installing the MPEG card.

Where can I get a suitable driver for the Multimedia Driver and what else can I do to try and get this arrangement to work please?

END

Whether I get a reply is yet to be seen, but I'm hoping someone out there has encountered similar problems and might be able to shed some light on how if at all they resolved the issue.

Supplementary to the above, I did install DirectX for Win2K with no sign of improvement. I know the issue is with the Multimedia Controller. When attemptig to use the MPEG devices software an error occurs that says it couldn't find the requested file. When I try and quit the application Win2k reboots.

Manufacturers site is http://www.mediaforte.com.sg/

Thanks.

Regards Roger Griffiths.

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