Thanks for the info on DVD playing.

I now have another issue for people to ponder...

I have a SCSI CD-Writer and if I run digital audio extraction on that at the same time as trying to do something with the hard disk, programs trying to use the hard disk seem to be made to wait for the CD Writer, i.e wait until the end of the track being extracted, and in syslog I get a series of messages like this:

Jul 21 23:04:29 pelvoux kernel: hdb: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy } Jul 21 23:04:34 pelvoux kernel: ide0: reset: success

My initial guess as to what is happening is that the SCSI card is hogging the PCI bus and preventing any commucication withe IDE controller.

This is the second time I have come accross problems with things getting in each other's way - the other one was with video capture. In that case I thought turning on DMA so hard disk writes would be faster wold improve vide capture but actually resulted in many more lost frames than driving the hard disk in PIO mode.

So, can anyone confirm from the little information I have here that this indeed a PCI bus sharing problem or suggest what it might be instead. Either way can anyone think of a software solution to it?

Steve.