I recently had a problem with choppy DVD playback on DVD movies. I found out that I need to enable DMA to make it stop. I did that by typing the following in the terminal.................
"hdparm -d1 /dev/dvd"
That seemed to fix the problem, but now every time I reboot the system its turned off again.

I searched the forums and found something about editing the "/etc/hdparm.conf" file to do that, but it did not say how I go about editing it or even what I'm supposed to type into it once I do figure out how to edit it.

I am very new to linux so I don't really know how to do even the most basic things in linux, so could somebody please tell me is there any way to make the setting stay on after a reboot?

See the http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=LinuxTips page on the wiki for some basics on editing files and the like.

As for how to make get the settings applied automatically everytime you reboot see this thread http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13089 The bootmisc.sh technique is the simplest if your system isn't running the hdparm init script. There are example commands in the thread for determining if that is the case or not.

Thanks for the guide on basic linux usage....handy.
I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but I tried adding the following line to the file "/etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh"
"/sbin/hdparm -d1 /dev/dvd"
After rebooting it had no effect....DVD playback was still choppy.

Then I deleted those changes and tried adding the following to the same file.
"
/dev/hda {
dma = on
}

/dev/hdc {
dma = on
}
"
Again after rebooting it had no effect.

After poking through the script I'm guessing that a "#" in the scripts are the same as a "REM" staement in Basic, or a "//Comment//" in C and are ignored by the computer. Is this correct?

I'm sure it something stupid, but I don't know enough about linux to figure out what. Could you please tell me exactly what I have to type and where in order to fix this problem?

Thanks in advance

You're thrashing around blindly playing poke and hope and that's generally doomed.

Do the diagnostics. If links to /etc/init.d/hdparm don't show up in the /etc/rc?.d directories when you run the following as root:

Then making changes to /etc/hdparm.conf isn't going to accomplish anything. Once you know if it is or isn't _then_ you can start editing files.

As the old saying goes "measure twice, cut once". If you don't measure at all your chances of getting it right are almost exactly zero.

Thanks for the pointers....especially for the basic linux usage guide....thats gonna come in really handy for me in the future and it explains a lot.
I just got the problem licked it seems, but in case anybody else has the same issues later, I'm gonna post what I did as best as I can remember it here for future reference.

Overview
You need to add the command to enable DMA on the DVD driver to the file "/etc/hdparm.conf" and update the startup file to boot these changes by default. This worked for me so I hope it works for anybody else having the same problem.
These are the steps I took as best as I can remember them.

1 = First open up the console by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1 then login as "root"
2 = At the console type in "nano /etc/hdparm.conf" to open the file with the nano text editor.
3 = At the very bottom of the file add the command to enable DMA by typing in the following..................................

4 = Then save the file by pressing CTRL+O and exit by pressing CTRL+X
5 = Then make the file update by typing in "update-rc.d hdparm defaults"
6 = Then restart the file to make the settings take effect by typing in "/etc/init.d/hdparm restart"