Vista guest: ATAPI/DMA?

[nospamboz]

I have Fusion Beta 2 on my C2D iMac (OSX 10.4.9). I have a XP Pro x64

guest and a Vista 64 Ultimate guest that work fine (you know what I mean ;^).

I installed VLC 0.8.6a media player on the XP x64 guest and was able to

play a DVD movie with VLC just fine. When I tried the same on the Vista

64 guest (after shutting down the XP x64 guest), though, as soon as I try

to play the DVD, a Fusion message comes up about a problem with the

ATAPI and DMA.

On the non-Fusion VMWare boards I saw a warning about making sure

the ATAPI driver in Windows is set to use DMA. It is, both in XP x64 and

Vista 64.

The really strange thing, though, is that if I shut down the Vista 64 guest,

start up XP x64, then try to play the DVD in VLC, I then get the same

Fusion ATAPI/DMA warning, even though the XP x64 guest worked before.

The only way I've found to clear up this state is to reboot my iMac.

The fact that this ATAPI/DMA problem persists despite a guest shutdown

makes me wonder whether there might be two problems here: first about

how Vista does DVD access, second how Fusion implements ATAPI/DMA.

Can anyone reproduce this problem? Any ideas?

Thanks.

[nospamboz]

Some more data.

In addition to my interval Superdrive (MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-85J),

I also have an external firewire LaCie DVD (TSSTcorp CD/DVDW

SH-S162L).

The situation with the persistent ATAPI/DMA is for my Internal drive

(cdrom0). When I use the Fusion settings to select the external drive

(cdrom1) instead, the persistance problem does NOT occur. VLC in XP x64

plays the DVD movie, Vista 64 gets a ATAPI/DMA problem, but then XP x64

will play the movie. There is no persistence problem for my external firewire

drive.

Note: My internal drive is set to region 4 (I'm in Australia), and my external

drive is set to region 1 (I'm an American), but I doubt this has anything to

do with it.

[howlingthunder]

Just so you know - you're not the only one. I have a MacBook with same drive and a Vista guest. Not sure if it's linked, but I have issues reading DVD's in the Vista guest and absolutely NO PROBLEM in OSX. I have downloaded Fusion 1.1 but am hesitant to try due to a lot of the feedback thus far. Any chance that 1.1 might fix?

[nospamboz]

Wow, that was some time ago. The persistence problem I described all those months ago disappeared with one of the beta upgrades.

However, watching DVDs within a Windows VM is still problematic. I get my best results using (ahem) Mac the Ripper (donate!).

Windows Media Player never works even then, but Media Player Classic does a good job when pointed to the VIDEO_TS.IFO file,

as does VLC when pointed to the VIDEO_TS directory. Reading the DVD directly sometimes works with MPC or VLC, but not often,

still getting strange ATAPI messages from Fusion.

Of course, I could always watch them in MacOS X. Nice Player is good for that, but I hear the Leopard DVD Player will be much improved.

VLC is also fine on MacOS, obviously. Handbrake does wonders as well.