Can I Run Other Programs While Viewing a DVD Movie?

MagicDVD drives cannot accept DIVX discs. DIVX discs are purchased, and with it, you get a 48-hour viewing period that kicks in when you insert a Divx disc and press "play." If you want to watch the movie after that, you have to call the service and pay a fee via credit card, and the service renews the license to play the disk for a limited time, or, for yet another fee, permanently.

What does “overlay surface not supported by your display card” means?

PowerDVD requires your display card to support DirectDraw overlay surface, so that DVD subtitles can be properly displayed. Please refer to the Choosing DVD Playback section for how to determine whether your display card supports DirectDraw overlay surface. If you do not want this message to be shown again, either simply check the option Do not display this message next time or uncheck the option Show warning messages. If you would like to re-enable this warning message, simply check the option Show warning messages again.

What Are the Differences between Hardware and Software DVD Solutions?

The main difference between hardware and software DVD decoders is CPU utilization. Software DVD will utilize a much larger portion of the CPU. A software decoder has the great advantage of not taking up a PCI slot in the PC and has equivalent performance to hardware.

Can I Run Other Programs While Viewing A DVD Movie?

It is not advisable to do any multitasking while viewing DVD content. Running other software while watching DVD content may produce video corruption.

Can scratches affect a DVD disk?

Most scratches will cause minor channel data errors that are easily corrected. Major scratches may cause uncorrectable errors that will cause an I/O error on a computer or show up as a momentary glitch in DVD-Video picture. DVD data density is physically four times that of CD-ROM, so it's true that a scratch will affect more data. But DVD error correction is superior to CD-ROM error correction. It's also important to realize that MPEG-2 and Dolby Digital compression are partly based on removal or reduction of imperceptible information, so decompression doesn't expand the data as much as might be assumed.