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DVD playback quality: 8500 vs. decoder card...

L

lechevre

Junior Member
Hi there,

Was wondering what might give me the best DVD playback image quality: Radeon 8500 (retail); or, a DVD decoder card (ie. Hollywood) paired with a GF3 Ti 200 video card?

Gaming and DVD watching are of equal importance to me, though I'd rather have a crisper dvd imagery than super high game framerates per second. My current specs are:

Thunderbird 900mhz
Asus A7V-E mobo
256 MB PC 133 ram
Voodoo 3 2000 PCI
Toshiba 16x DVD
Samsung Syncmaster 950P "19
Windows 98 SE
I won't describe my ghastly soundcard ,or speakers.

Any suggestion? Cheers,

Bruce
 
Software decoding has come a long way since inception. Granted, you can see a miniscule difference in the favor of hardware if you are running a system that has limited recources. The system you described should handle software playback with no problem. I personally wouldn't spend the money for a hardware decoder if all you are going to do is payback movies & etc. I don't know of too many games that are out in dvd yet. if you are playing a non dvd game, then obviously your hardware dvd decoder would not come into play. I have a Radeon 8500 and use Windvd 2k. It is more than adequate.
I have experimented with both software & hardware decoding using a high end television connected to the pc. The only real difference I saw was the quality of the dvd player in the pc. Don't go with the no name cheapo brands like affrey or Pine. I don't know precisely why, but the higher end pc dvdrom drives seem to perform better. I ended up using a Sony OEM dvdrom drive.
 
Watching on your monitor? You won't notice a difference between the GF3 and the Radeon. Skip the Hollywood+.

Watching on a TV? It's a toss-up between the Radeon and H+. Maybe a slight edge to the Hollywood+.

But if you want the GF3, skip the Radeon alltogether (or get JUST the Radeon) - running them both in the same machine would be a hassle and waste of money.

Or are you a little confused about which card does what?
 
If you use tvtool with your geforce tv-out, and use a good software decoder, you can get excellent results.

I'm pretty picky about video quality, but I've found that with the right settings, my computer can get really close my pioneer stand-alone dvd player for quality. I had to bump overlay brightness, since the geforce (visiontek gf2 ti) outputs darker than it should, but with the adjustments, it's fine.

powerdvd 4 looked pretty gross when I tried it, so I stuck with windvd 2.3. excellent quality.

a hollywood + would limit what you could output to tv though. No divx/mpeg 1 out to tv I think.

edit: oops, you have a v3 now. Thought you already had a geforce. But still, a geforce2 with a bt868/869 or the new brooktree/conexant tvout chipsets should do well with tv-tool. Only problem is that you can't run tv-out at the same time as your monitor, so you lose one. If you wanna game though, it's still a good choice.
 


<< a hollywood + would limit what you could output to tv though. No divx/mpeg 1 out to tv I think. >>




Hollywood+ can ouput any mpeg to its tv out. There is also a program out there to output divx files but its still buggy.
 
I use PowerDVD 4 (XP) and it looks good with ATI Hardware decode, but I think software decode looks cleaner.
 
The Ati DVD software looks better than any other video card on the market. No jaggies, no blotchy color, it really is perfect.
If DVD is that important to you I would definitely recommend getting an 8500.
 
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