Help Me Install A DVD-ROM!

It seemed simple enough. I opened the computer yesterday surveying where I would put the drive and what I would have to do (taking the CDRW as an example.) Two cables - The IDE and the power.

When I got the DVDrom today, it came with an extra one...And I have no clue where it should connect. Is it even necessary??

-Thanks!

EDIT:: It's an LG GDR-8126b and came with an 'audio cable'. Apparantly the CDrw doesn't need one of those..

 

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Update::

Okay, I got ONE thing to work (despite my putting the cable in a some unknown socket.) Now I have another problem: The DVD is very slow and choppy. When it shouldn't be.

My comp is 2.4 GHz, made with a sound card that's 'supposed' to be the most compatible (creative) and I have a fairly good video card (GEforce 4 MX 440.)

I also found that playing CD's in the CDRW is also slow, but never thought anything of it, since I listen to MP3's..

Anybody know what to do??

 

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The audio cable actually is usually needed for the CDRW. When the CDROM or CDRW or DVDROM or whatever plays a standard music CD, the CDROM itself decodes the music and plays it. This audio is piped through that wire into your soundcard or your motherboard (with onboard sound). You may be saying yourself, "My CDRW never had one and I've played music before". When this happens its because whatever software you're usign to play music, doesn't actually play the music by sending a command to the CDROM to play the music, instead it copies the data to the memory and the software decodes it.

-AntonK

 

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Thanks, but do you know anything about why my DVD's are sooo choppy. Honestly, it's a good computer. They shouldn be smooth.

 

Lot of times, choppiness is the software or memory issues. Check for the latest drivers for it and the codexs needed. If you are still having problems look for other software. Many folks make software on the net that are compatable with a wide range of dvd players.

The other possibility is that without the sound cable hooked up to your sound card your processor is working overtime trying to decode both sound and video files.

Luckily I didn't have these problems, my reader and recorder are both liteon. A good quality brand.

 

Thanks -- That was technically the issue. (Well, actually the stupidity of windows. I'd swear that Gates goes out of his way to make computers an UNenjoyable experience.)

What I found is that windows XP has a stupid little quirk in which you cannot normally configure UDMA data transfer to work. In other words, windows makes it impossible for the average user to choose a data tranfer option which 'may cause data loss' rather than not watch DVD's at all! So instead of at least having the choice, you can stick to the excessively sluggish PIO (unwatchable,) OR -- force DMA by messing with the bios. After tinkering, it was much simpler than I had hoped. All that had to be done was to configure the secondary drive to 'auto' instead of none. And DMA was forced.

Of course microsoft has a nice little explanation on their website, but you just know they're fucking with the innocents...

Now I have to worry about the seperate problems involved in configuring DVD under linux!