What's a better software DVD player: WinDVD or whatever comes with the Radeon?

[Noriaki]

I have WinDVD 1.2.99d that came with my DVD Rom
And now I have ATi's DVD player that came with my Radeon..

Which is better..I want DD5.1 to 4 channel downmixing for audio, and any features of the Radeon that make the DVD video better would be nice to

Can WinDVD take advantage of all the Radeon DVD features, or do I have to use the Radeon DVD player for those?

 

[HKSturboKID]

Asus have one call ASUSDVD.
The interface looks pretty good. Its also like Mediaplayer 7.

 

[Zucchini]

whichever is the equivalent to windvd 2000 2.2b

 

[Noriaki]

no..WinDVD 2000 is version 2.x
I'm on 1.x, it's before 2000.

But I like it just fine, it does the 4 channel downmix on audio, my main curiosity is whether or not is supports the Radeon DVD features.

 

[Noriaki]

bump?

 

[DABANSHEE]

Use what came with the Radeon, as the Radeon has hardware DVD/MPEG2 decoding built in.

Actually all ATI cards with 16+MB have hardware DVD built in & so do some of their later 8MB cards.

 

[kami]

ATI's player is good because it uses the Cinemaster engine. I prefer PowerDVD 2.55 though.

 

[navap]

bump

 

[navap]

bump

 

[Soulflare]

Is their any particular reason why you're bumping just about
every single thread? Looks like we've got a stealth NEF
on our hands.

 

[DABANSHEE]

"ATI's player is good because it uses the Cinemaster engine. I prefer PowerDVD 2.55 though."

That's got nothing to do with it Kami, the fact is the ATI cards have got hardware accelerated DVD decoding built in.

Contrary to the claims of other video card companys that claim there cards do DVD decoding most do it only via software. Just recently some cards have started doing 'Hardware Motion Compensation', such as the latest Nvidia cards. Also S3 Savage cards have been doing 'Hardware Motion Compensation' & a couple of other hardware DVD asist algarithymes too for a couple of years know (not that anyone noticed). However for a quite a while now the ATI cards (since the Rage 128) have been doing the whole DVD hardware acceleration shebange - As well as having a very good 'Hardware Motion Compensation' engine built in, it also does 'Hardware Sub-Picture Acceleration' & has an IDCT unit too, plus a couple of little algarythems thrown in for good measure.

Now, even though the ATI player uses uses the Cinemaster engine its been specially modified by ATI to utilise all the DVD Hardware acceleration built into their cards.

That's why its so good.Now if you have 400+mhz you might not notice any difference between using WinDVD, PowerDVD & ATI's own player on a ATI equiped system. But as soon as you try to do a bit of multitasking while playing a DVD, you'll notice a big difference straight away, as the ATI player will take advantage of all the on-board hardware acceleration, thus freeing up CPU & system resources. Sure the latest revisions of PowerDVD & WinDVD might claim to take advantage of on-board motion compensation units & on-board IDCT units, but they do not fully utilise all the hardware DVD aceleration on the ATI cards, nore do they do it anywher near as efficiently as ATI's own player, which was specially built from the ground up (using the Cinemaster engine as a base) to take advantage of all the hardware asist features of the ATI card. Plus as they were coding the software for their own hardware, it much more efficient (because of insider knowledge & undocumented features, etc).