README.TXT For REALmagic Hollywood Plus(TM) Release 2.2 beta (Build 139_5) for Win 9x -- June 15th, 2001 ============================================================ Congratulations on your purchase of REALmagic Hollywood Plus DVD/MPEG2 multimedia Playback . This file contains important information for installation of the drivers and application software for this card. _____________________________________ FOR FUTURE UPDATES & NT DRIVERS VISIT OUR WEB SITE www.sigmadesigns.com Latest Drivers & FTP Access - Hollywood_Plus _____________________________________ FOR MORE TROUBLESHOOTING TIPS VISIT OUR WEB SITE http://www.sigmadesigns.com/support/faq_hwplus.htm FOR THE FAQ SECTION - Hollywood_Plus ____________________ IMPORTANT NOTES CONCERNING THESE DRIVERS : ======================================== 1 - If you are using Microsoft Office XP and you have its utility CTFMON.EXE running, it'll stop DVD Station - the Hollywood Plus- DVD player from playing encrypted movies. This utility injects MSCTF.DLL in the memory space given by Windows to hardware and software manufacturers. A workaround is under investigation to avoid this conflict. A temporary solution is to disable this utility before the playback of movies : press CTRL+ALT+DEL, click on CTFMON.EXE, and click "End Task". After the movie playback, restart CTFMON.exe from Start-Run : ctfmon.exe & OK. 2 - The movie Stuart Little for Region 2 has some bad data at the start of the movie disabling the playback. To enable it, click IMMEDIATELY the Pause button after inserting the movie or after starting DVD Station if the movie is already inserted (or pressing STOP/Play and then Pause) and press next chapter. WHAT'S NEW IN RELEASE 2.2 ========================= - The drivers are at the same level for Win 9x/Me, NT 4.0, and Win 2K. They have the same functionalities but not interchangeable. - Fix for a bug in release 2.1 affecting the non English versions of Windows related to the TV output switching to NTSC/PAL. - Fix to re-enable the SCSI support after being disabled in release 2.1. - Fix for the playback of different movies, especially from region 2, such as X-Men, Gladiator, .... We could not test all movies but the support for ISO and UDF in reading the DVD discs provide a larger compatibility with movies and DVD-ROM drives. WHAT'S NEW IN THIS RELEASE 2.1 ============================== - The drivers are at the same level for Win 9x/Me, NT 4.0, and Win 2K. - Implementing the UDF file format in its full features, increasing the compatibility with most of the DVD movie discs. No need anymore to turn off the UDF file format for some movies(in msconfig utility). Examples of movies fixed : Region 1 : The 10th Kingdom, The Abyss, Alice in Wonder- land, Chinese Connection, The Doors, Entrapment, Last of the Mohicans, Legends of Fall, Men in Black, Mulan, Natural Born Killers, Out of Africa, Ravenous, Sneakers, The Thin Red Line, The World is not Enough, ... Region 2 : A Bug's Life, Blade, Heat, Tarzan, The Wedding Singer,... - A fix for movies changing the encryption keys in the middle of the movie such as : "Man with the Golden Gun". - A fix for a flicker on the lower third of some PAL TVs. - Support for the Philips SVCD format where the folder name is MPEG2 instead of MPEGAV and file names have extension MPG instead of DAT. - The audio output behaves as Rel 1.7. Example of supported boards : - Canyon 3D (ESS Chip) Diamond MX400 (driver 4.07.00.2004) - Forte Media FM 801 - (driver 4.05.00.3203) - Sound Blaster EMU10K1- EDF (driver 4.05.1037) WHAT'S NEW IN THIS RELEASE 1.8.2 ================================ - If you need to start DVD Station in full-screen mode, you can do it now by adding the line "fullscreen=1" in the [Settings] section of WVP.INI in the directory where you installed the applications (usually REALmagic). For audio CDs and drives with MPEG contents (defined as data by DVD Station panel, you can start DVD Station in Repeat mode by adding the line "repeatmode=1" in this same section [Settings]. - A fix for the movie "The Sixth Sense" for R2/R4. - Some movies encoding requires to disable the UDF format for proper playback. Please see note 15 in section VI below for details. - This release of the drivers will behave like rel 1.7 as far as the support to special sound cards. CLARIFICATION NOTE ABOUT REGION CODES : ------------------------------------- The program "DVD Drive Region" in the REALmagic Group is for setting the region code of the RPC2 drives. The region code on the hardware of Hollywood Plus is irrelevant in this case. If you don't have an RPC2 drive, then the control will be by the region code on the Hollywood Plus. This can be set by running SETUP from the second diskette (application) and select the second option in the menu : "1 - Install Application, 2 - Set the region code". WHAT'S NEW IN THIS RELEASE 1.8.1 ================================ - A fix for a bug while accessing the MPEG data on some movies that leads to the error message MMSYSTEM275. This bug was introduced in release 1.8. - Some region 4 movies published by a certain company are exhibiting audio noise during playback. This is due to some CRC errors in the AC-3 stream and can be fixed by ignoring these errors using the registry entry IgnoreAc3Crc=1 in the folder HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Sigma Designs\REALmagic\13 It is recommended to have it equal to the default value zero to allow the driver to handle these errors by not decoding these blocks (or passing them to the external AC-3 decoder, if available). WHAT'S NEW IN THIS RELEASE 1.8 ============================== - DTS is now supported : whenever you choose the DTS option in a movie menu the OUTPUT WILL BE DIRECTED THRU THE SP/DIF OUPUT IN DIGITAL FORMAT REGARDLESS OF THE DVD STATION AUDIO OUPUT SETTING, so the DTS stream is NOT decoded thru the analog mini audio jack - NTSC to PAL conversion does not suffer of the 1 sec stuttering - The audio volume sliding bar shows in full screen - PC Friendly will show the playback of movie with the black key color (video was not shown with rel 1.7 - audio only heard) - A timimg fix for the Jaton's OEM board on Pentium III systems - The audio special output (6 channel Wave) support to sound cards is removed for copyright issues WHAT'S NEW IN THIS RELEASE 1.7 ============================== - Implemented basic support for RPC2 drives (DVD-ROM drives that carry the region code) - Added auto-calibration "on the fly" when no calibration has been done before at the current resolution/color depth. - The audio special output (6 Channel Wave) supports the ForteMedia sound card. WHAT'S NEW IN THIS RELEASE 1.6.2 ================================= - A fix for the playback with AC-3 audio output for some movies (in the previous release it needed to start in Stereo output mode) - An improvement in the auto-calibration - The Help file shows a description for the buttons which did not have one in the previous release. - Support for Chinese help under Chinese Windows - There is a special audio output now for the Formosa (nFIC) sound card based on the ESS Canyon3D sound chip. This audio output setting will route internally the audio output to the sound card, downmixing to 6 channels WAVE API. NO output comes from the stereo audio jack of Hollywood Plus. This setting is ONLY good for this sound card. If you don't have this sound card, please do not use this setting. WHAT'S NEW IN RELEASE 1.6 ========================== - The TV output option has two new settings : - MultiSystem : the output will follow the source of the movie, i.e. if an NTSC movie the output will be NTSC and the same for PAL - PAL 60 : the output will be at a frequency of 60 Hz, the same as NTSC but with PAL colors (needs TV set with this capability) - A fix for the playback on some systems that were crashing when outputting to TV - A fix for the permanent display of some movies' subtitles - A better handling of the AC-3 output to suppress noise appearing on some Dolby Digital decoders (when AC-3 output is enabled) - A fix for the disappearance of the second subtitle line or the highlighting of a wrong area for the menus buttons on TV (when loopback cable is not present) - A fix for movies encoded the same way like "Die Hard III" region 4 which was not played back properly - A larger tolerance range for the PAL TV sets - Addition of a button in DVD Station to set your preferred default DVD-ROM drive - Addition of the option "/f=filename" on the command line of DVD Station to allow the direct play back of the file - Compatibility with the IBM MPEG 2 title "Worldbook 1999" CONTENTS ======== I - DRIVER AND APPLICATIONS INSTALLATION II - BORDER ADJUSTMENT AND COLOR CALIBRATION III - DVD REGION CODE CHANGE IV - TV OUT V - FULL SCREEN PLAYBACK VI - HINTS TO RESOLVE PROBLEMS AND BETTER PLAYBACK I - DRIVER AND APPLICATIONS INSTALLATION ==================================== After the hardware installation of the card do the following: 1. For an existing installation (if not go to step 2): uninstall the previous software by going to the REALmagic Group - Uninstall, reboot, and follow steps 2 and 3 below. 2. On booting your system, Windows 9X will detect the card. Insert the REALmagic Hollywood Plus Drivers Disk in your floppy drive A and click Finish. This will install Hollywood Plus drivers on your hard disk. 3. To install the DVD navigation software insert Application Disk into drive A and run SETUP. You'll get a menu whether to "Install Application" or "Set Region". Select the "Install" and Setup will copy the files. If the board is new (no region code is set), Setup will ask to set the region. If not, or after setting the region, Setup will calibrate the colors and adjust the borders. Note : there is no need to set the region code if the board was used before installing this version (or if you remove the board to a different system.) II - BORDER ADJUSTMENT AND COLOR CALIBRATION ======================================= NOTE: If the border is not adjusted properly after Auto Calibration you may need to set the Border Adjustment to get more accurate adjustment. You need to set the Border Adjustment only once for each setting of display resolution. 1. At the Start button, click Programs and select REALmagic Hollywood Plus program group. Click REALmagic Configuration. 2. Click on Adjust Border and use the proper buttons to adjust the black rectangle in the magenta box. 3. Change different values to adjust stability if you are viewing jumping pixels on MPEG video. Click OK when you are done. 4. The Reset Default button will reset the color calibration and border adjustment values to the factory default settings. Note 1: Color calibration is required if the colors are not normal or the screen is pink or not clear. If color calibration is required, Click on "Auto Calibration". The screen will flash for 5 to 10 seconds then display a message that the calibration is complete. Click OK. Note 2: In the cases where this calibration is unsuccessful, you can click on Advanced..., then the Manual Calibration. This will involve fixing the R, G, B sliders as shown in the window four times. You can use the up/down arrow keys for fine tuning and you don't need necessarily to see the cross but just the disappearance of the vertical bar. III - DVD REGION CODE CHANGE ====================== 1. Run SETUP from Application disk. Select DVD Region Code change option. Set the region code according to the country you are in. This setting goes onto the hardware of Hollywood Plus and there is NO need to set it again if you move the board to a different system. _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._ Note: The setup program will allow you to change the region code for five times. If you want to reset the region code settings after five times contact the card manufacturer or an authorized distributor or service center. A nominal handling fee will be charged. __________________________________________________________ Note: If the system includes an RPC2 DVD-ROM drive that carries its own region code, DVD Station will check the code against the movie and will issue an appropriate message if not matching (the Hollywood Plus region code is ignored in this case). Movies will not playback if the drive is new and has NOT been set for a region. IV - TV OUT ====== The REALmagic Hollywood Plus can display on a VGA monitor or a TV set. To switch between these modes an icon is provided on the left corner of the DVD Station control panel that toggles between computer monitor and TV. In order to display on a TV, some additional settings may be required. From the DVD Station control panel click Options button. This will open a window for options setting. Click the settings tab. Select the options according to your TV type. The color control, brightness, and contrast controls have also been provided for TV. Note : Some TVs are sensitive with video frequency input and may show Black and White video on TV. This has specially been noticed on some PAL TVs. In such a situation do the following WHILE the TV-Out option is active and DVD/MPEG is playing on TV.: 1. From the DVD station click the "Options Dialog- Settings tab. 2. Press Configure and then press Advanced Settings. 3. Select Expert Settings and click the mouse. This will open a pop-up window. Adjust different values until you have color picture on TV. Notice that you need to keep on going in one direction when changing the values i.e. either always increasing or decreasing because of the hysteresis nature of this adjustment. V - FULL SCREEN PLAYBACK ==================== In order to playback in full screen, double click the left button of mouse anywhere in the MPEG window or press Ctrl+Z. This will playback the video in full-screen mode. In order to go back to the window mode, press Space in full-screen mode and it will resume playback in the restored MPEG window. See "What's new in 1.8.2." above for details in starting DVD Station in full-screen mode. VI - HINTS TO RESOLVE PROBLEMS AND BETTER PLAYBACK ============================================= 1. The drivers are installed and the Hollywood Plus appears in the "Device Manager" but the CD's won't play. Run SETUP from the second diskette (Applications) to create the "REALmagic Hollywood Plus" group. This group contains the DVD-Station, README file, REALmagic Configuration, and Uninstall. 2. With the Hollywood Plus board and the drivers correctly installed the system crashes after boot-up. Start Win 9X in the Safe mode, select the Hollywood Plus board in the Device Manager, manually change the Memory Range to a different setting for the Hollywood Plus and reboot. 3. The REALmagic Configuration can be run but when the DVD-Station is started (or the Media Player with an MPEG file) the system hangs. Check the Device Manager for a conflict in the IRQ resources and make the necessary change(s). 4. After installing the first disk for the drivers, and run SETUP from the second disk, the following message comes up : "Driver cannot be loaded, another instance from the driver may be running". Or when playing an MPEG file after the software installation, there is an error message "MMSYSTEM 266 : undetectable error ...". Reseat Hollywood Plus in different PCI slots because of some of the motherboards BIOSes handling of the resources. 5. The MPEG files play and the audio can be heard but the video is a solid color. Run "REALmagic Configuration" and select "Auto Calibration." Or, make sure that the output of the Display Adapter is routed to the Hollywood Plus input and the Display Adapter's output is routed to the monitor. 6. The picture is waving. Run "REALmagic Configuration," select "Border Adjust" and adjust the STABILITY: smoothness of the two vertical sides. 7. MPEG 1 files run normally, but DVD movies are shaky. Make certain that the DVD-ROM drive is connected as a Master on the IDE controller. And turn ON the DMA flag in the "Device Manager-DVD ROM drive-Settings-DMA." 8. When running Video CD on the CD-ROM drive, the playback is shaky. Connect the Video CD drive as a slave to the hard disk and not on the same controller with the DVD-ROM drive. If you are using the original release of Win 95 make sure you have installed the Microsoft fix (IOSYSUPD.EXE - from their web site). This fix smoothes the playback of Video CDs from the slave drives. 9. I get an "MMSYSTEM error 275" when I try to play a DVD encrypted movie. This can happen if you are using the original release of Win 95 and you have the CD-ROM drive as a slave to the DVD-ROM drive. Replace the file ESDI_506.PDR with its equivalent in OSR2 in the subdirectory IOSUBSYS of Windows/System. Another possible reason is the presence of an RPC2 DVD-ROM drive NOT set for any region. 10. For DVD-ROMs that require high data transfer rates, it is better to have the DVD-ROM drive connected to an IDE controller with the "Bus Master" mode activated. Most of the recent systems have it activated. 11. If you are using Rel OSR2 of Win 95 or Win 98, check on the DMA feature of your DVD-ROM drive. This can be found in the Device Manager by double-clicking the entry for the DVD-ROM drive, clicking the tab Settings, and checking 'On' the DMA feature. 12. Playing long DVD movies, above 4 GB in size, is supported by the Microsoft CDFS.VXD of Win 95 Rel OSR2 and later versions. 13. Capturing of an MPEG frame from an encrypted DVD movie is not supported because of Copyright issues. In other cases the capture feature gives its best results at a color depth of 64K (16 bits) or higher. 14. Playing VOB files using the Media Player might not show the best performance because of different navigation schemes. Use the DVD Station for this. 15. Video is fine on VGA but is Black and White on TV. Please see section for TV-Out. Please note that some TV sets in Europe using the SCART connector have inputs for S-Video but do not support, however, the S-Video signal. The display will be B&W. Check your TV manual for details. 16. When watching the movie on TV, the picture gets dimmer and brighter at short intervals and with some movies some yellow horizontal lines appear on the TV screen. The TV set is connected to the PC system via a VCR or an alike device. This device initiates the Macrovision protection of the movie. Connect the TV directly to the PC system. 17. The S-Video connector on Hollywood Plus is a 7-hole jack and my S-Video cable has a 4-pin socket only. The 4-pin cable is compatible with the 7-pin socket. There are more pins on the 7-pin socket to provide for the composite TV output. 18. I lost the S-Video/Composite Converter cable and have no access to another one. Order another one from your supplier. In the USA, you can check the phone number or the email address of the fulfillment center on the web site . The pinout of this converter is as follows : _________ / \ | 7 6 5 | | 4 3 2 1 | | | \ OOOOO / --------- 1:GND 2:Composite 3:GND 4:GND 5:Luma 6:not connected 7:Chroma 19. You can watch some movies but not others, using a Toshiba DVD-ROM drive model SD-1202 with the firmware number 1018. Upgrade the firmware to 1020. 20. The Hollywood Plus drivers do not support DTS audio on DVD movies. It allows only the DTS stream to go out to an external decoder. If you do not have such decoder, play the Dolby AC-3 stream instead. 21. You want DVD Station to check your DVD-ROM first and it has a drive letter after the CD-ROM. Rel 1.6 and later of this DVD Station allows you to set your preferred drive. Options_Dialog/Play_List/Default Drive. 22. You see the video but no audio. - Try first the speakers plugged in Hollywood Plus and be sure the output from DVD Station is Stereo. - Check the audio jumper cable from the output of Hollywood Plus to the input of the sound card. If no sound, check the volume mixer to have Line-in NOT muted or at low level. - If you are using a Dolby Digital Receiver, make sure that it accepts AC-3 streams (if your setting in DVD Station is AC-3), otherwise it must be a PCM decoder and in this case set the DVD Station output to Surround. - There is no need for an audio cable between the back of the DVD-ROM drive and the CD-IN of Hollywood Plus. You can connect this cable straight to the CD-IN of the sound card. This is used by the audio CDs and not the DVD discs. 23. The maximum refresh rates allowed with the Hollywood Plus MPEG playback depends partially on the display board. However, the following can be used as a guideline: 640 x 480 120 Hz 800 x 600 100 Hz 1024 x 768 85 Hz 1152 x 864 85 Hz 1280 x 1024 85 Hz (75 with some boards) 1600 x 1200 85 Hz If you have some blurriness on the Windows desktop due to the analog overlay and some display adapters, please reduce either the resolution or/and the refresh rate of the display adapter for a better display. You can remove the pass-thru cable if you watch the MPEG video on the TV set only. 24. The Hollywood Plus does NOT support the MP3 files playback. 25. While the movie is playing, the DVD Station freezes. Check if you have a network card 3C905B. If it is, uninstall its driver and install only the 4th disk (avoiding the diagnostic program). Or upgrade the 3Com drivers to version 4.1 or higher. 26. You have a third generation DVD-ROM drive (RPC2 specs that require a region code on the drive) and you cannot playback movies. Run the utility for this drive to set the region code to your country code. 27. One of the possible reasons of being unable to play encrypted movies is having a Virus Scanner running on the system. Please disable the virus scanner before running DVD Station. 28. What is the pinout of the VGA signals on the pass-thru cable? View of the 9 pin socket of the pass-through cable, seen from the bracket: _________ /_________\ | | | 9 8 7 | | 6 5 4 3 | \ 2 1 / --------- 1:Blue IN 2:GND 3:Green IN 4:GND 5:Vsync IN 6:Hsync IN 7:Red IN 8:SDA (from pin12 of DB15) - PnP monitors 9:SCL (from pin15 of DB15) - PnP monitors 29. Connecting the digital audio output in the back of some DVD-ROM drives to the S/P DIF input of some revisions of the Hollywood Plus, might disable the S/P DIF output of the Hollywood Plus. It depends on the drive model. If this happens to your system, just disconnect the digital audio cable (not supplied with Hollywood Plus) between the drive and Hollywood Plus. 30. Implementing new flags in the Registry to disable the resetting of the board between files. Adding these flags allow you to play a list of files in the "PLay List" of DVD Station without loosing the synch signal going to the TV set between files. Add under : HKLM\Software\SigmaDesigns\REALMagic\13\General two DWORD entries - DontDoHwReset with value 1 and ACPIEnable with value 0. These flags will also remove the flashing between files on some systems. NOTICE : Corrupting the Registry could make your system unusable, please make backup and exercise caution when modifying it. 31. Hollywood Plus plays back DVD, Video CD, and S-VCD disc formats besides regular MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 files. It does not play the "what's called " DiVX format. 32. I have a USB speakers system and I don't hear audio. Add a DWORD entry "EnableDac" with value 0 under the Registry entry : HKLM\Software\SigmaDesigns\REALmagic\13. If you are using an ESS sound card and notice that changing the audio volume in DVD Station does not affect the Center channel, add in the same place the DWORD value "SetCentreChannel" with value 1. ================================================================= END OF FILE