Do I have a DVD playback issue?

[spwango]

Hey all,

I've never been a movie buff, so this is my first experience with DVD...I recently purchased a Lite-On 16x/48x DVD/CD--The main purpose was to replace my aging 24X cd rom...however, I decided to see how the DVD playback worked. I was not very impressed with the quality using Power DVD 3.0. The picture seemed grainy (looked like it could use some anti-aliasing) and the frame rate was on the slow side, in either windowed or fullscreen mode. I was kind of surprised by this, because I have a pretty powerfull box. AMD 1Ghz, 256 M Ram, GeForce 2 Pro---I'm running Win98SE, and yes, I have DMA turned on for the ROM...so, is there something wrong with my configuration or are my expectations for the DVD just too high?

Thanks,

spwango

 

[Soccerman]

first of all, the visual quality might look bad, becuase you're probably running it on a monitor capable of displaying much higher resolutions then what a DVD offers.

remember, DVD is MPEG2 compressed video with AC3 (which is compressed 5.1 channel audio). both are lossy forms of compression. with a monitor you see EVERYTHING that a DVD gives you (TV's tend to hide the bad stuff). you're probably seeing the compression artifacts.

I can't answer your speed question, becuase it should run perfectly fine (I ran a K6-2 400 with a Voodoo 3 which has absolutely no DVD acceleration, and BARELY got by with software acceleration, but it was there.

 

[Duvie]

I agree with soccerman...

I have same lite-on 16x dvd-rom and I have no playback issues...My radeon looked better in terms of picture clarity but my geforce 2 pro looks pretty dam good too...

 

[spwango]

I think it works worse than VHS, though...both in terms of image and framerate...do you all still think this is normal?

 

[sandorski]

No, it shouldn't look that bad(which is kinda hard for us to know by your description). Are you trying to playback at an odd resolution? DVD's are 720x480 at default, trying other resolutions will affect performance and quality.

Also, I'm not familiar with PowerDVD but, have you played with some of the video settings?

 

[spwango]

Thanks,

I found a patch, and that seemed to clear things up..must have been a support issue...looks nifty now.

spwango