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ATI and nVidia Crush High-End DVD Players
An anonymous reader writes "Hardware.Info compared the video quality of ATI and nVidia video cards containing Avivo / PureVideo technology with 12 stand alone DVD players, varying in price from $200 to over $2000. The conclusion? 'There is no need to invest $2000 or more in a high-end DVD player. A PC with a recent graphics card will produce a much better result for a lot less money. When looking at the final scores of the HQV test, both ATI and nVidia graphics cards perform a lot better than any DVD player we have tested. We would go as far as to say to get rid of your DVD player and connect a media centre PC to your LCD television!'"
Damn, those heatsinks are just getting too big!
We would go as far as to say to get rid of your DVD player and connect a media centre PC to your LCD television!'"
Well, not all of us would buy a $2000 DVD player. I still cannot see the reason to buy anything more expensive than the $250 one I have at home. What do these multi-thousand dollar DVD players do anyway?
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-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
When I first put in my mythtv box, the quality difference was immense. Even on live TV there is decent upsampling by the software and hardware (nvidia) which is very obviously higher quality than an untouched broadcast. DVD is upsampled to a very pleasing level and because of this the myth box has been my primary DVD player since it was first installed. The TV is a 30" Medion with a DVI input (basically a large monitor) with 1280 * 768 resolution.
Warhammer forums
- no patch tuesday
- no boot time waiting
Isn't it enough?
The fan on that ATI card looks loud.... I think the DVD player would be quieter.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Maybe I should just drive the "Information Superhighway" to buy a frickin "Laser". Seriously though, the thought of adding more cables to my computer desk, which already looks like an e-pubis, makes me wanna cry.
the mods may say you posted flamebait, but to me it's a flame that warms my heart. rock on, brother! --chebucto
time for a networking home server ?
The people who buy the $2000 DVD players are the same people that buy gold plated connectors and cut their speaker wires to identical lengths so the "electrons travel the same distance which improves the sound quality". That means: these people are morons. Morons cannot be stopped.
If you are really looking for a multimedia experience, and audio/video quality is important, the first step is getting rid of all the fans.
All that is needed is a "blank multimedia" box for $200, that has DVI/HDMI and S/PDIF, with no moving parts except for the DVD drive.
Then you plop in the Open???Player (vlc based?) CD/DVD/USB and it updates the internal flash to create/update your player to the latest codecs. Or perhaps internal flash is not needed, and the root disc is USB flash.
Seriously people, if you have the cash for a 2K 1K or even a $500 player you probably dont feel like building one. There are an enourmous amound of benefits to getting a pre-built expensive DVD player, reliability being just one factor.
Before I get a lot of posts telling my of the uptime and reliability of their MythTV box, dont forget that you have to build the thing or hire someone to build it for you if your are not a Linux Geek. Even with Media Center Edition you are still dumping 1300 into hardware and inviting a ton of issues into your multimedia system. Unless of course you love hearing that windows error Dong in full Dolby surround sound.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
"We would go as far as to say to get rid of your DVD player and connect a media centre PC to your LCD television!'"
If you're single and live studio apartment, this might make good economic sense if you really need high end graphics. You can just connect the PC to the TV and continue to use the PC for other purposes.
But in a typical family environment that media centre PC will have to be dedicated to entertainment purposes, so the real price comparison is the cost of the media PC + the graphics card vs. the high end DVD player. Then the comparison doesn't turn out to be that one-sided.
I am not very impressed with the usability of any media center PC that I have used, regardless of OS. A good DVD player just works, doesn't crash, doesn't have fans and doesn't take more than a few seconds to start spinning a disc from power on. Doing that with an HTPC is not easy. HTPCs have their strengths but I'm not convinced that ease of setup and usability are among them.
our $200 video card is better then $2000 DVD player*
* dvd drive and computer not included.
This is all moot anyways. Most people aren't going to buy a media PC for a significantly higher cost than a DVD player. Mine costs 60 bucks and will play divx/xvid.
This test would have been a bit more relevant if they had told us what hardware the PC was using and/or had tested older graphics cards. I'd consider doing this with an old computer, but wouldn't shell out new money on it.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"Final scores
The total score for nVidia ends up being 93, where the total ATI score is 118. Both scores [ed.] are extremely high, considering the score of the most best performing DVD player we tested (the Marantz DV6600) was only 63. The majority of the standalone players we used did not score more than 40 points in the test. The most expensive ones, the Denon DVD-3910 and Marantz DV9600 scored only 58 and 61 points.
For European readers the cadence tests are not of real importance, so we only take the first eight tests into consideration. The score then is slightly different, nVidia scored 58 in these tests, where as ATI scored 53. A pretty close result, and the slight advantage for nVidia is mainly due to the excellent PureVideo performance in the detail tests.
[score matrix breakdown omitted]"
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Is any of this fancy pants video processing capability usuable under linux? It had better be, after all the PR about how nvidia's drivers share around 98% of their code between the windows and linux versions.
I've had enough problems with bugs in their linux drivers (demonstrably broken dual-channel dvi configuration), that I could have fixed with access to source code, that I expect something for having to put up with their BS. If they can't even make the video processing available under linux, I might as well stick with the old ATI cards which do have fully open driver source.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
There are actually a lot of people using PC as DVR for the longest time... nothing's surprising really.
Maybe they should use some high powered nVidia and ATI graphics cards to help serve up the webpage.
Hell, use some of those high-end DVD players if it will help.
Let me be the first to say 'No shit, Sherlock'.
I wonder how cost-effective at this point it would be to simply store DVDs lock stock and barrel on drive arrays and view them on HTPCs. I want the best possible image and all menus and features of DVD, not just rips.
And I also wonder if the Sony XL1B2 Firewire changer is fully-supported in Linux? Cuz this would be a no-brainer sale for me if I could hook it up to a Myth box...
anyone have a mirror?
It is amazing how someone can lose time doing such research!
Hindsight is 20/20! There is no research on well-known facts!!
Facts:
1) Video processors in PCs are usually much more powerful, even when compared to the high-end video equipments
2) The CPU is also much more powerful, as a typical consumer product uses a simpler one, typically an ARM processor
3) Most VGA monitors and panels in the market today have higher resolution and finer pitch than most consumer TV sets, even high-end...
Of course there are some exceptions (probably the most expensive ones), but it is much more likely to have a better image quality to price ratio on the PC than using consumer equipment.
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong."
H. L. Mencken
I still have not found anything that will beat an XBox with Xbox Media Center (URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBMC) and an HDTV cable upgrade.
Might aswell as I have the page up...
Denon DVD-1920 (58)
Denon DVD-3910 (58)
Marantz DV6600 (63)
Marantz DV9600 (61)
Panasonic DVD-S97 (68)
Philips DVP 5900 (35)
Philips DVP 9000S (53)
Pioneer DV-989AVi (59)
Samsung DVD-HD850 (30)
Samsung DVD-HD950 (30)
Sony DVP-NS92V (35)
Yamaha DVD-S2500 (53)
Hope I matched those up right...
Belief is the currency of delusion.
With 16GB USB sticks that can hold at least 2 movies, we can walk up to most PCs without even needing a DVD player on them for basic playback. But what's the highest end USB TV decoder we can carry to friends' houses, without carrying the delicate/bulky PC that they already have?
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make install -not war
ffdshow DVD guide :
e nt&task=view&id=132&Itemid=54
http://www.htpcnews.com/index.php?option=com_cont
A bit older, but still very useful.
Haven't tried these cards yet (too poor :) ), but most dvd players I've used are pretty lousy at deinterlacing (xine wasn't too bad, but installing linux is more work than I want to do right now).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Please note that the score for Panasonic DVD-S97, 68, is actually correct as per their table, even if the text says "the score of the most best performing DVD player we tested (the Marantz DV6600) was only 63". Don't shoot the messenger.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I opened the Panasonic up in an attempt to fix it, and found the design used the flimsiest of components. It was a testament to their engineers that they could get even 18 months out of the parts they used. See my blog post for a description of the brilliantly craptactular construction.
When I finally got a replacement, I looked for an older in-production model so I could get some reliability info. I paid a bit more for it (maybe $100). It's built like a tank. The video quality is no better, but it's built to last.
--Pat
I don't know why everyone buys these fancy toasters! Especially, those people who already have a radiator on the back of their fridge that gets plenty hot. For less than $20, you can make a plywood platform that allows your fridge to swivel and then attach a wire bracket to hold the bread against it. If you're the least bit technical, you could rig a digital thermometer to the serial port on an old 486 motherboard (who doesn't have twelve of these sitting in a closet?) to email or page you when the toast is ready. Can those fancy toasters do that?
At some point, everyone draws a line between what's a good homebrew project and what's worth buying. For each person, the line is different. Most people who want to watch a movie are still going to go with the easy, reliable, warrantied, and polished product for that specific purpose.
and what it never mentions is how did they connect those DVD players to the TV. The simple chinese junk costing under 100$ are usually connected via a composite, or an S-Video cable at best. Now the difference in the quality of signal you can get through a composite cable and a higher-end component or HDMI connection is rather large. If they connected the PC's using VGA or DVI and the players using a cheap composite cable - well, no wonder the players sucked. You just can't transfer that kind of information through a single wire.
On a side note, the other reason most people use component players is their sound. A good Hi-Fi player has a much higher quality sound than any PC. You can probably get close to the quality of the sound of a under-1K$ player wtih a great sound for a PC, but let's face it: latest generation video card + high end sound + the PC... There is no much price difference. And that PC still doesn't play SACD.
I've had my PC hooked up to my HDTV ever since PureVideo was released. I went right out and bought two 6600GT's as fast as I could (have since upgrade due to one of the 6600GT's going bad). I couldn't be happier with the DVD output, but I hate having to start up my computer just to watch a DVD some time. You have to run Windows (I normally use Unix based computers), and it takes almost 5 minutes to boot sometimes, depending on what new Anti-Virus, Spyware, System updates there are, and also what other programs decide to run at boot. I still have these troubles even though I have a top-of-the-line PC running Media Center 2005. I'm really waiting for Apple to release a Mac mini CoreDuo with PureVideo and then I'll gladly be able to format my current media center!
I wonder what would happen if a manufacturer created a video card and just let the community write open source software and drivers for it? Save the company the expense of writing the drivers and let the community develop a large potential market for them.
It would seem to have the added advantage of forcing the others to support Linux, but I'm betting that open source drivers would be more widely received, even if the proprietary drivers were better. Just seems that would be a good way to sell more video cards.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I figured, that my nvidia made a lot cleaner and higher resolution image than my $200 DVD player, even on my old 800x600 epson projector, but then I met the disturbing truth:
...
...
.... :(
-my wife hated to mess around with my pc just to watch a disc
-i did not find a decent remote control
-playback software was a lot more complicated than the one the DVD player has
- problems started after a driver upgrade (spdif sound disappeared on my ASUS A8n SLI after installing recent NFORCE drivers)
I mean these are mostly problems for my family, I am ok, watching with a wireless keyboard, and enjoying the better quality, but for everyone else it is just awkward
Yes, i watched my high bit DVDs, and my matrix collection (at least eyecandy parts) on it and was happy, but for everyday use, it was just a pain
especially, bc that is my gaming rig as well, so if my wife wanted to watch a chick-flick, while I wanted to shoot at people online, a clash happened
In addition to what has already been said about higher picture quality, many DVD players also have onboard DACs for the analog RCA outputs. They also can have expensive toslink outputs for fiber connections between HT components. Virtually all high end DVD players also now have not only the toslink and component video outputs but some even have discrete outputs for each channel of your audio system.
These $2K DVD players can have quite the level of bells and whistles but buttons and programming features are cheap compared to the processing requirements needed for DACs, audio output management and picture management. In addition, any output also requires a transformer of some sort and an entire circuit for output. The output circuit electronics are usually very high quality and those parts are not cheap. Neither is the educated labor necessary to design and refine those circuits.
The reason things are of such high quality and is because cheap components allow things like coloration of sound, poor performance of circuits and noisy circuits that introduce chatter and interference into the system. When that noise and interference reach your amplification circuits and display circuits, they get amplified too. This leads to poor performance in not only picture reproduction but also audio reproduction.
These DVD players are expensive because alot of talent and design has been sunk into them to provide those who wish to get the best experience they can out of movie viewing can do so. Add to that the fact that these high dollar units are test beds for features that get trickled down to other, cheaper units and that is why we have 20-50 dollar DVD players that can do what they do.
A home theater is just like any computer system. All the parts interact and it is only as good as your weakest component. If I am going to load up with 50K worth of Martin Logan speakers being driven by Conrad-Johnson amps with a Krell pre-amp stage and a Pioneer Elite plasma display, I am certainly not going to use a 50 dollar DVD player as the source for all the sound and video in the home theater. At that point, the shortcomings of the DVD player would be glaringly obvious.
Now, if only one could get a decent sound card to do discrete 7.1 channel output with digital decoding (preferrably hardware decoding) for an affordable price, that whole media PC idea might actually gain some ground in the marketplace.
Why no reviews of any of the many myriad MPEG2 decoders out there? It's like they're saying that the only way you can get super high quality DVD playback is to use a modern GFX card and a specialist decoder library.
My MythTV system uses Xine to play DVD's via an nVidia 6150 chipset straight into the DVI input on my TV. It uses XVMC motion compensation to cut down on CPU usage (not that MPEG2 decoding and filtering uses much CPU at all these days - my AMD64 3500 sits at 1GHz and uses about 15-25% CPU playing back a DVD with postprocessing activated), and the quality blows anything else I've seen out of the water. Similarly, using ffdshow on my workstation in windows mode results in a really good picture.
If you ask me, most people will be more than happy with the default decoder that came with PowerDVD or what have you. It seems silly to do a "PC's vs. DVD players" comparison and leave out what 80& of people are using. Are there any other MPEG2 decoder reviews around?
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
I'm the "proud" owner of an X1900XTX and let me just say they're very very very loud.
It's hard to explain what's stupidly wrong with the design without needing drawings, so bear with me. Let's just say that as the turbine sucks air from one side (as opposed to above and below) and blows it out the other, this necessarily creates a narrowed bottleneck in the airflow. The air can only enter a centrifugal turbine from above or below, so that incoming airflow has to be narrowed into a duct going under the turbine. This however creates more noise (as the air moves faster through that narrowed space) and needs the turbine to spin faster (to make up for the extra drag factor of that narrow duct).
Seriously, I just have to wonder (A) if that stupidity was designed by some graphics artist or marketroid instead of an engineer, (B) WTF were they smoking at the time? Must have been some really good stuff. And (C) where can I buy some of that stuff? And don't get me wrong, I have nothing against a good graphics artist or marketting expert when they work in their own field, but engineering is best left to real engineers.
You can somewhat silence it by replacing the stock cooler with a Zalman or Arctic Cooling cooler, but don't expect miracles. It's a very very hot chip, so even a well engineered fan and heatsink still need to move a lot of air to keep it cool. It will just move it down a notch from "jet engine take-off" levels to merely "loud fan" levels.
I've managed to reduce it even more by also involving a good case (lots of airflow without needing insane number of fans) and some generous soundproofing of that case, but still... it's at best described as "low noise", not "silent". It's ok to play games with the headphones on, but it's not quite what I'd want in a movie player.
And here's why not: movies have a wide range of volumes, ranging from muffled footsteps and whispered conversations to shrieks and explosions. Even if you got your PC to be only 30 dB or so, that's the noise level with which the low volume parts of the movie will have to compete. If a whispered conversation there is, say, only 40 dB or so, on top of your computer's noise it will be at a lousy 10 dB signal-to-noise ratio. It's already in the domain where you may have to rewind to listen again, because it's hard to understand what they're saying.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I can see it now; "All in one graphic card. Now with easy to attach wheels to vacuum-clean other parts of your house too!"
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Gold plated connecters really are better.
However, go to Radio Shack or even Home Depot and pay a lot less for the cables with gold plated connectors.
Buying cables from a well known brand at a hefty price premium often isn't worth it. Paying only an extra dollar or two for a cable that has connectors that are resistant to corrosion is often worth it.
In short gold plated is worth it, but not at the well known brand over inflated price.
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm
The big problem is that the video output from these consumer video card devices is never synced properly to the source video rate. The "cadence" tests in this article are worthless because no encoding-based pulldown is happening since it's being rendered progressively. The pulldown that's happening instead is taking the progressive source (or god forbid the interlaced source) and displaying it on whatever frame rate your display happens to be set to.
Working with film, this means 24fps. If your display is 70fps, 75fps, etc. that means some ugly pulldown is in store.
What gets even worse, however, is if you use the video output feature of your card in a HTPC setup -- you wind up having it go through ANOTHER PULLDOWN to 29.97fps (NTSC) or 25fps (PAL) FROM THE PULLDOWN YOU DID BEFORE. Even worse it's resampled and scaled for this output.
This is pretty apparent in pans in movies and such -- the pans are never quite smooth exactly.
Also since sound and video are usually totally unsynced subsystems in a HTPC, the audio is often slightly out of sync with the video. This causes an occasional audio or video skip (depending on what the playback software recognizes as canonical sync). For short clips this usually doesn't happen, but the skip will often happen over the course of a movie. If it's syncing to audio, the frameskip/delay is usually not noticeable because it gets lost in all the pulldown issues mentioned earlier.
While it's possible to make a HTPC setup that syncs the video properly to avoid these issues, I've never seen a HTPC setup do it right. I've seen embedded Linux and WinCE devices do it correctly, using custom code to ensure proper video syncing.
Standalone DVD players, even most cheap ones, get everything synced properly to a reference pulldown (29.97 or 25 fps, progressive if supported). Framerate and audio sync is always correct, to the nearest level capable of the pulldown.
It's a shame, because modern LCD/Plasma displays with digital inputs should theoretically be able to handle real 24fps input for film sources, for instance, which is something current DVD players don't do. Try getting your HTPC to output 24Hz and getting your media player, going through all the video and audio APIs of your OS, to sync every frame and every audio sample exactly to it. =P It simply can't be done -- you have to code to the metal.
(In studio environments video editing PCs actually have professional video/audio cards that have custom APIs and synced internal clocks to be able to ensure perfect framerates and audio sync and to make sure playback is timed properly on them. I know someone who's built themselves a HTPC with gear like this and it works great.)
Here is what I am reading.
- $2000 is way to much to spend on a standalone DVD player. I think we can all agree on that, especially in light of this article
- For many people a $35 DVD player is plenty. People that spent $60, sorry you spent too much if all you got was 480p output, but maybe your player will last longer though, but does it really matter if the player lasts for 18 months vs 3 years if it costs you twice as much.
- For those of us with Plasman/LCD/DLP/etc HDTV displays with HDMI or DVI inputs this article is of great interest to us. Every time we turn on our TV there is upconverting going on. If we are watching a DVD then it is either the TV or the DVD player that de-interlaces and upconverts. If we watch SDTV it is either the TV or the Media PC that upconverts. Unfortunately even more expensive TVs do not do the best upconverting, and can often introduce delay in the video image that effects the audio sync if you use an external audio device, like a reciever. So for those people the fact that plain old $60 NVIDIA video cards (with passive coolers or small fans) can deliver very high quality de-interlacers and upconverting this is very interesting. Espcially to those of us with, or planning to build Media PCs.
That is to say if you don't got the display to make this matter then of course it does not matter, but given the wealth of features in a Media PC this added bonus of superb video output is just one more reason to build one, assuming you have the know how. Being a geek does have its priviliges you know.
I've generally been really happy with nVidia, but now the GLX extension reliably crashes X.org. I have to either disable it or use 'blank screensaver', because my screensaver kills my session every time I leave my computer for a few minutes. It's a newish card (I forget the model right now, but it's got 256MB, if that helps) in a laptop, so maybe that's the cause. I dunno.
Otherwise, it works great. Twinview, digital vibrance, CRT detection so it does the right thing in docked/undocked situations, etc. Just the GLX issue.
A lot of the other comments cover reasons why using a PC might not be the best even if the video quality is superior. One thing I want to add is SACD support. My $500 Denon DVD player will play SACDs in addition to all the various DVD things, progressive scan output, etc. I haven't found anything PC or Mac based that will do this. MLP too, but that's less of a concern.
Duh.
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
Other than the cadence section, I didn't really find any direct comparisons of de-interlacing quality from the review. One feature that's particularly interesting on high-end stand-alone DVD players is DCDi, which is some nice looking adaptive de-interlacing method. It looks like nVidia's PureVideo has some smart de-interlacing method in its decoder, but how does that compare to DCDi?
I bought a $50 DVD player at Costco that does a great job. A "Media Center PC" means a Windows PC to play the DVD (for most people). Those graphics would have to be damned good to make anyone want to screw around with any PC running any version of Windows just to play a DVD. Never mind the hardware cost, or even the M$ software cost. No, the real cost of the system would be the time with updates, disk management, hardware updates, software updates, activation crap, spyware, viruses, scripting agents, etc. etc. I can imagine someone hooking up the MPC as a novelty for a short amount of time but then leaving it turned off in the corner after a while when the MPC needed whatever, and just using the DVD player. There's no way Microsoft could ever make Windows into powerful software that any normal person would want to use every day for something like playing DVDs, watching TV or keeping the beer cold. Using your PC to watch TV might work and it's cute, but TV sales are not suffering any.
It's inevitable that digital equipment will integrate more entertainment and household functions but it will never happen with anything called 'Windows' produced by any company named 'Microsoft.' They've been milking the Windows/Office cash cow for so long that they're unable to do anything else. For those kinds of devices to take off, they'll have to support open standards and protocols, be offered by several different large companies, and be simple and inexpensive to use. Maybe Sony, Nintendo, Toshiba, Panasonic, or HP could be players. Microsoft...no way.
The article essentially says "our $2000 PC can play DVD video as good as some $2000 DVD players"...
Please.
Here is a $200 DVD player that will perform better than most $2000 PCs:
http://oppodigital.com/opdv971h.html
I'm not saying you cant do great things with video using the right PC setup, but that article failed to point out the respective costs of the hardware they used for making this comparison. I won't even get into usability comparisons...
Como? Cuando? Que?
Oh, you say you can't get a 400 disc carousel to fit in my case for $50? Bummer, 'cause I need space for my discs, and the safest place is in a jukebox. Sure, I could rip all those DVDs and store them on disc, but that would take 2.8TB of disc space, and even at .30/GB I can buy two 400 disc jukeboxes for the price of the hard drives to store one. Why would I spend $500-600 on a box, plus $350 to $600 on the video cards they tested, to do the job of a $60 player, or the $500+$350+$850 (suprise: $1700) to get the equivalent storage of a $300 jukebox? This assumes that there is no value behind the time it takes to set up such a server.
Oh, two other questions - can someone who has never seen this box walk up, turn the TV on, and press play on the remote? Can this be done in the 5 minutes it takes to set up the standalong player?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
They have one really important thing. Sound. The higher end units have much better isolated power supplies and better designed analog audio and analog video outputs. In lower end home theaters, the dvd player will also be the music CD transport. These same high end DVD players have up-sampling for audio CD and support for SACD formats. SACD itself is only permitted to be transmitted digitally in one or two proprietary systems, which usually means that you will most likely be using the analog outputs, which then rely on the internal DAC's in the player, which in lower quality devices will be one of the first placed that the manufacturer will cut corners to save money.
Now most will also have things like video up-conversion and much better digital outputs then your standard $250 dvd player. However, that is not always the case. In fact Oppo, makes 2 DVD players that go for around $200-250 which have unbelievably good video output and have up-conversion. However, their analog outputs (component, composite, s-video) are all crap. Unless you can use the DVD/HDMI output, they are horrid to watch, but any new TV should have these inputs...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I can't see paying more than a couple hundred $$ for a standalone DVD player these days. Judging from my recent visit to the super electronics store nearby, I can even get an upconverting playback DVD all-format recorder for that. How much would I pay for the ATI/Nvidia card? $400 or more? And then the computer to plug it into? While there may be some quality difference, I can't imagine that price/performance ratio makes sense beyond $200 or so for a DVD player in any form, so I can't imagine going the PC route to watch movies on my TV from the argument of picture quality.
I spent s good bit more than $200 on my MythTV box, but that gets me far more capabilities than a DVD player offers.
Are we starting from scratch for this comparison? If so, then in my house it would go something like this:
A) HDTV dual-tuner Media Center PC w/1TB RAID + 600GB non-RAID storage, $1900
B) DVD Player +
HD PVR Equipment & Monthly Subscription +
CD Player / Recorder +
AM/FM Tuner +
(Many things simply not practical or available as individual components) = $???
Besides that, we get a lot of added conveniences out of going the PC route: Our entire photo album & home video archive is available in the living room (where we can quickly slideshow a particular set of pics on the widescreen TV); Need to return a DVD somewhere but haven't watched it yet? No problem, back it up, watch and delete later (yes, we really delete without sharing or burning); Our entire music collection is searchable & it gets output to the stereo amp in digital optical quality; In addition to AM/FM radio, we have dozens of options for streaming music from Internet sources like Pandora.
Also, we can skip those pesky, "mandatory" 10 minute indoctrination pieces at the beginning of DVDs, and we can acquire and play content at HDTV resolutions.
The most valuable feature of all, though, is that when we get stuck in one of those "who the hell is that actor?" or "what else have I seen her in?" conundrums, we can just pause and get the imdb answer without leaving the couch. All the other features combined? $1900 (incl. 1TB RAID-5). That last feature alone? Priceless.
Pi Ran Out
So maybe someone with more knowledge can answer this. I remember reading a few years back that there was some company modding DVD players to output firewire at full DVD resolution (720x480 or some such). The studios were torqued because the licensing for DVD players said they could only put out standard def. It's been a while so the details are fuzzy though. Is it due to the PC's putting out the DVD's at the native 720x480 resolution while the DVD players are forced to downsample the video? Are there DVD players that can now output full resolution to an HDTV?
Use the MacMini as a DVD jukebox (it's easy enough to make in a normal DVD player, so why stop there?), and don't forget it also runs MythTV's front end easily, and comes with a remote (and receiver) built in and FrontRow (easy access to pictures, music, movies via an interface designed to be used on a TV).
Yes, it also does DVI out as well as optical out (and S-svideo), and happens to be cheaper than a $2,000 DVD player (about $1,500). All you need to do is go spend some of that saved money on a bluetooth mouse and keyboard which will work with it just fine (look, Ma, no wires!).
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
While many of the HQV tests from Silicon Optix are useful (the 2:2 and 3:2 cadence, the jaggies), some of those other tests (6:4, 5:5, 2:2:3:2) are so rare they really are almost never going to apply to users. Just because the video cards can detect obscure cadence you will never use, doesn't mean they will work better for you in day-to-day use. Also, there is a good market for a $2,000 DVD player out there. If you've spent $3-10,000 on a projector, a ton on your sound system, and your DVD player is the source for all of this, you're going to see all the errors on the screen much better than on your 20" LCD, much like you'll hear if it has poor audio better with your high end sound system. If you watch most things on your 27" Sony TV, or your monitor, it's not going to make a bit of difference. If you have a 50"+ screen and can notice all the slight MPEG compression artifacts in HD broadcasts, you're going to want to squeeze out all the detail you can from DVD and other lower resolution sources.
Get a MacMini. $500 -- built in IR/remote, bluetooth for wireless keyboard/mice, DVI, S-video, multiple USB ports, gigE, wifi, optical audio out, etc.
If you really want to make it more silent (even though they're quiet), you could disconnect the power on the onboard HD and have it boot via network, although I haven't experimented with that. The MacMini is far quieter than the Xbox Media Centre it replaced, and much more capable of decoding higher-resolution movies.
Yes, the software will autoupdate itself. In a year of using software update on various Macs, I've never had the service cause an issue like the Xorg update in Ubuntu did recently.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Something by M-Audio, such as the Revolution 7.1, might fit your bill.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The $500 MacMini does a lot more than a $50 DVD player (MythTV front end, Frontrow + remote, gigE/wifi, bluetooth, StepMania, other emulated games, etc).
Yes, it's 10x the price, but you get at least 10x the features, with the only limit being what a computer can do.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
MICROSOFT
I guess it comes down to what features are important in a particular household. I don't switch DVDs often enough to need button-click access to my entire collection. In fact, even a 6-disk changer for audio CDs has 4 about slots too many for me; I'm not sure why, but it just ends up being simpler for me to handle A/V media one disc at a time.
Also, I prefer that strangers *not* be able to monkey with my home theater stuff without my help. My technophobic wife can handle it just fine, and that's all that really matters.
Movies that are worth $4.00 worth of disk space get it, those that aren't don't. I'm happy with the setup, and the old DVD player has been collecting dust ever since I built the HTPC.
Just my $0.02 + state, county & municpal taxes, void where prohibited. YMMV, of course.
Pi Ran Out
That's insightful indeed, but if you _are_ interested in 3D gaming, then (A) your main gaming rig will be too loud, and (B) just getting a DVD player might still be cheaper than building a silent second computer.
- The OS alone for that second computer might set you back more than the cost of a cheap DVD player.
- Add a graphics card, even a low end X300 at that, and some RAM, and by now you're a little over that $200 mark they quote for a good DVD player.
- Add a CPU. And if you want really silent there, you're probably going to end up with a Dothan or Core, and they cost a fair bit. (Yes, you can silence an Athlon too, but that involves a copper heatsink, a high end Papst or Panaflo fan, and some rubber pins and mats, so there go even more money.) You'll need a motherboard for it too, at that, and the Dothan ones are anything but cheap.
- Now you're up to the PSU and case, and let's be frank: your average "silent" PSU is actually really noisy. The ones which really are silent, e.g., the Antec Phantom, also cost a bit more than the average. And if you went with the Phantom and a fanless graphics card, you probably don't want to stuff them in your average no-name case either, since then the case's fans will bring you back to square one. No, you'll want a good mesh case, so natural convection does most of the work.
Alternately you could go with a Zallman TNN (Totally No Noise) case which acts as a heatsink itself. Those are as quiet as it possibly can get. Unfortunately they also cost several hundreds of dollars even for the smallest and cheapest model.
- Hard drives aren't that expensive nowadays, but if you go for a good silent Samsung and some rubber mounts, it's going to be a bit more expensive than just chucking in your old 60 GB drive from the ball bearing era and sounding like a high powered drill. For _really_ silent you might even have to go with a Flash drive or RAM drive, at which point it costs a mint.
- And of course, you need the DVD drive itself. Again, they're anything but expensive these days, but it still needs to be bought.
- You'll also want a good graphics card, since, honestly, it's a media centre, not a white noise and squeak machine. While a cheap ATI card or even onboard graphics may be perfect for DVDs, but if you'll pardon the obscenity, your average onboard sound system sucks hairy ass. The signal to noise ratio of most mainboards is a sick joke, and a lot tend to squeak or click each time anything happens on the bus. Lack of shielding tends to do that. It just won't do as a high-end DVD player substitute. So you're going to end up with an Audigy 2 or insert your favourite other high-end card.
Well, you get the idea by now. By the time you put together all that, with care that you keep your noise down, you could have bought 2-3 DVD players for the same money.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Its a joke - really.
I have a fairly expensive NAD unit. Sure, it produces a nice picture; but the hardware is far from exotic.
The unit consists of a DVD drive assembly, a power supply, a stamped chassis, and a very small circuit board with readily identifiable (and inexpensive) parts.
I've even looked at the internals of some Rotel units. Sure, the mechanicals look like they can take a bullet, but the digital heavy-lifiting is done in some very cheap, off the shelf, components.
It's not suprising that a PC with a good video card does a better job.
-ted
What a crock of a conclusion. They failed to mention the interconnects they used on each system, what it was connected to and if it was properly calibrated. Not to mention, they left out half of what makes a DVD player a DVD player - sound! And how about:
Not to mention I haven't had to install a service pack or patch on my DVD player. Ever.
I may be a bit behind the times, but aren't the standard Creative Audigy whatever-the-heck-number-we're-on cards up to 7.1 with options such as TOSLINK and all sorts of hardware encoding/decoding up to snuff, and affordable?
Now granted, I'm not running the newest soundblaster card, and I don't have those fancy $2,500 speaker wires that another poster linked earlier; but, my little Soundblaster Audigy 2 Pro seems to make some pretty nice sounding music without any crazy distortions.
Of course, maybe I'm fatally flawed in the acoustical reception department, or I have some other grand character impugnment laid against me which renders me a poor judge of audio quality; but, I still figure that maybe $200 USD for the Creative Soundblaster X-Fi is probably worth the look before dumping $2000 dollars into a single use device.
At least with the media center PC you're not as limited in what functions you may perform with it as you are with the DVD player. I'm sure World of Warcraft would look just grand on a 100' screen.
"[Physics] has nothing to do directly with defending our country, except to make it worth defending." -- Robert Wilson
Is figuring out how to get the DVD to spin on my video card :(
;)
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Insightful? Not very.
Funny? Perhaps.
Waste of mod points? Yep
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Common sense, let alone benchmarks would tell me that my 2 year old, £200 video card would perform better than my 2 year old, £200 DVD player. And to all those folk moaning about the noise and cost of HTPC's - for less than £1000 i could build an almost silent HTPC with 10x the functionality of any standalone DVD player out there.
I know i'm a new member and all, but it seems like we've had 8 slow news days this week.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
I have a mac mini. The fan revs up loud for cpu usage.
I would have liked to see what results you would get from running VLC as your media player instead of the ati/nvidia software that may not be included with your card, and unable to download for that matter. Would the results change when using a opensource media player?
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Not sure if anyone has mentioned it yet, but by using an xBox 360 you can get a really nice picture while playing a dvd. My bro-in-law uses one bascially just to play dvds. You could say it's pretty close to a Media Center PC.
Note: I am not an MS fanboy or even xbox for that matter. I don't own an xbox, and I also have only purchased Macs my whole life.
Please, don't trying turning me into that pariah of the electronics world, an audiophile. Yes, I am enthusiatic about audio and I would qualify in most peoples views of the literal definition of an audiophile but, my background is in engineering and I am firmly grounded in the reality that I cannot change the laws of physics.
That being said, the Audigy cards are "noisy". They are noisy because even though they can have said output, the PCI slot the card is plugged into is a huge souce of noise. Add to the fact that the line output isn't necessarily a true line output and there are circuts in line to control things like output gain and volume which will muddy up and color the sound. These are subjective terms, I know but let me try to illustrate my point.
Think of a row of grade schoolers. You whisper "Rodney likes to play bumper bowling." in the first kid's ear and have them whisper down the line. By the time you get to the end, the last kid says that he heard "Rubber baby buggy bumpers." Similar sounds and structures to the words but decidedly not what was put in the first kid's ear.
Think of that row of kids as a circuit. It can be shown that the lower the number of kids in the circuit, the less mangled the message will be when the last kid gets it. Another way to solve the problem is to use a higher level of kid. So we use high schoolers or college students and you can make a reasonable assesment that the message would retain more integrity with the same number of students because they are more developed.
The same ideas go for electronics. The SB stuff is certainly adequate for your average Joe. Nothing wrong with it at all, in fact, I myself own 7 different SB products and I am pleased with thier operation. However, like the DVD player discussion, the SB products are affordable because of the level of components. Tolerances and specs are not as tight and sound quality can suffer because of that. It is not noticable on much of the equipment marketed to non-audiophile types because they tend not to buy gear that can show those inadequacies. However, if I am putting together a high dollar, ultimate HT experience, a Sound Blaster Audigy will not necessarily give me the "audiophile grade" of performance I am looking for even though the box says it will.
The only saving grace for the Audigy is the digital output because digital either is or isn't and is fairly unaffected by environment variables like an analog signal can be. However, if there is noise in the processing circuits on the SB board then it will be transferred to the signal that is digitaized and encoded and pass through to the amplification circuit. Amplifiers are dumb things and will amplify sound very well. They will also amplify noise encoded in the signal from the signal source. So, it behooves the designer of the HT to use as clean of a signal source as possible in order to garner the best performance from his/her overall setup.
Personally, if I knew of a better choice, I would forgoe the Sound Blaster cards in favor of a more signal quality minded card that didn't have so any features and options to appeal to a larger demographic of users.
Did I actually make sense?
It might. Dunno though. I'll look around but in the meantime would you happen to have a link I could follow?
>>patented Cardas "Golden Section," multi-gauge stranding in a symmetrical, 12 conductor helical tri-axial design of quad-axial planetary arrays of golden ratio, constant "Q" conductors.
I've often thought it would be a great Science Fair project to compare an Ultra High End component cable to an Ultra Low End cable. And by Ultra Low End, I mean two untwisted 29-cent coat hangers wrapped with duct tape as insulation.
I bet there's not one person in a hundred who can tell the difference. And for that one person, would anyone give me odds on whether they'd prefer the coat hanger?
I leave the math as an exercise for the reader.
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
Here for the card in question, and here for the other offerings.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Or, you know, just use the TOS link he mentioned...
I wouldn't put a media center PC with the graphics card pictured on the first page. Fans are very distracting when watching a movie. I'd rather stick with a quiet DVD player then a loud PC.
No, I will not work for your startup
Go look online, the scores are way off for the HQV tests on many of the dvd players they tested. For instance, AudioHolics has the Denon 3910 scoring 75, not 58. It also does not appear to line up with other test results like the Home Theater Secrets massive DVD Benchmarks which has become one of the "standards" from home theater audio/video.
But in all honestly, lets be a little fair in the prices. Yeah that $300 video card with pure video or AVIVO does well in the tests, but you can't just use that $300 video card alone. You need the rest of the $1500 computer along with it. I have been using a HTPC for almost 2 years now. They are extremely hard to beat in terms of video quality. Especially when you factor in FFDShow (on Windows side). Yes, I have pure video as well on that box, but I don't use it because FFDShow completely "crushes" pure video, more so then what the Harware.Info review is showing of pure video and AVIVO... But that computer cost me $2200 to build (yes, build not buy, since no one offered anything like it 2 years ago, HTPC's were still a DIY only and to a point still are if you want it done right).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Do they intend to crush the high end DVD player market the same way that the Empire will crush the resistance with one swift blow?
It has been done.
The comparison was a blind test between bell wire (often used to wire your door bell) and some very high end interconnects. The panel of judges were audiophiles. The results suggested that they could all tell the difference between the two. However there was approximately a 50/50 split as to which cable was prefered.
matfud
I think it was the "which" magazine in the uk.
The problem is you either need a dedicated machine for movie watching or you have to divy up time on the machine between watching movies and using the machine. I've got a fairly high end graphics card and I'm sure the picture quality is nice but it is far more convenient to simply have a stand alone dvd player. Now building a stand-alone machine might sound like a great deal for as little as 700 USD or however cheap you can slap one together , that is , compared to the 2000 USD machine. But who buys the 2000 USD machine, i'll tell you, morons and people who have so much money they don't know what to spend it on. I mean it is a common fact that your ability to enjoy a film is based solely on the diagonal of your monitor, and of course measuring in cm is much more impressive. This is completely ignoring the administrative aspect, which is, to say the least non trivial. A mac mini might sound like a bargain for a mere 500 USD and well suited for the job but consider its graphics accelerator is not very powerful, hence, the image quality will only be marginally improved, if at all.
Home Theatre Secrets DVD benchmark shows the Oppo players as being one of the best, if not the best, and they are sub $200 players that outrank $2000 players.
I find it interesting that the most critically acclaimed DVD decks of the last couple of years were left out of this comparison...
Shawn's Tech Articles
I believe you are correct about monitor refresh rate being a key problem.
I have NEVER seen a computer workstation playback video as smoothly as a dedicated playback device.
At SIGGRAPH two years ago I saw several top-of-the line high-def playback systems that choked and skipped when playing back several minute long image sequences. In this case they were buffering full res Cineon files from disk.
For some reason VCRs, VTRs, laser and magnetic disk video recorders can play back smooth as glass.
Digital cinema projects, (which I must confess are fed by some kind of workstation) also look marvelous.
Back in the days of analog, and I would guess still today, all of cameras, recorders, and displays were slaved to a common synch generator, mostly so you could switch between sources without a glitch.
Fields are basically a holdover from the luminance characteristics of CRTs. As CRTs are displaced, fields should be banished.
Video should be stored so that the best possible full frames can be recovered. One thing that torques me about consumer DVDs is how they compress the image quality so they can stuff on those 'special extras'
I heard Walter Murch speak, and one thing he misses from film editing is being able to scan through full quality playback at 240fps.
I would say that if you have a standard def TV, then any Walmart DVD player will do. However, if you have a HDTV and care about video quality, then you have to worry about video upscaling. There is a very noticeable video quality difference between my cheap DVD player, and my HTPC with ffdshow. I also get a lot of use out of my HTPC as its my music server, video server, file server, DVR, high-def gaming console, and DVD player. BTW, why are people so concerned about fan noise. I sit 15 feet away from my HTPC, and my air conditioning is definitely louder than a little fan.
I knew a guy who did Sennheisers once in college. Last time I saw him he had just hocked his BMW to buy $2,500/meter speaker cables. He lived on one box of ramen noodles a week, but had a $14,000 tube amplifier, a $2,000 "power condidioner" and speakers elevated on $400 "sound enhancing" ceramic pyramids (the brochure said they were from Atlantis). He made me take off my watch before I could come inside, claiming it would "muddy the sound" since the band wasn't made of oxygen free copper. When I left, the watch was gone and he was replacing a cheap TOSlink cable with a $1000 one that was made from melted down cathedral windows.
Don't be that guy. Quit audiophile now, before you wake up naked, alone, in a gutter, owning nothing but a vaccuum tube.
There are many differences between a $20 Walmart Goldstar DVD player and a $199 Sony. There are certainly noticeable difference between a $199 Sony and a $2900 Denon. Are the majority of consumers going to spend the money to gain that advantage? No, but that doesn't negate the disparity between budget-level and high-end home theater gear. Do you guys use the same logic when you're putting together your ultra gaming systems? What, you mean the $19 generic video card doesn't perform as well as a $450 GeForce 7900??? Why didn't you spend $30 less on your power supply, they were both rated at 400 watts, they're both good enough right???????????
Troll: to post controversial or provocative messages in a deliberate attempt to provoke flames.
How was that a troll you stupid asshole mods.
Do you still use the software that came with it? I find it clunky and awkward to use, and occasionally buggy.
Is there a more recent version of the software I can download somewhere? I've lost track of the company web site.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The question is was it analog going across the wires or digital? My big pet peeve is the whole Monster interconnect for digital signals. It's a 1 and a 0. Why spend $150 for an HDMI monster cable when I can get it for a LOT cheaper?
Yeah, it made perfect sense.
Much of my comment was not inherently directed at you; but, thank you for proving that you are not, in fact, out of touch with reality. I can appreciate you point, and conceed that you may be right about the quality of the soundblaster series for very high end audio.
I am actually curious if you know of any higher end audio cards that would be able to provide a lower base noise level for the PC. There is no inherent reason that the PC audio could not be at the same level as that in the super high end DVD player, and sufficient shielding around the analog portions of the card should be able to provide as clean an EM environment as the DVD player is able to for its analog portions. If one could find such a card for under $1000, it would maintain the PC as a viable alternative with more flexibility than the multi-thousand dollar DVD players.
I could even imagine that a company could accomplish similar results by buying SB cards in bulk and testing/binning them for resale at various qualities. They would be forced to sell the cards determined to be of lower quality (higher noise) at less than retail, but theoretically they could pick the cards with the fewest defects and sell them for enough to offset that loss and still make money. The question is, is the best quality that Creative can offer good enough, or is it a choice of component type and not just quality control that produces a noisier component?
Just a minor point really, but thank you for proving me wrong about my improper assumption, it is certainly something to consider if I'm ever able to enjoy an environment where my sound card would cause problems.
"[Physics] has nothing to do directly with defending our country, except to make it worth defending." -- Robert Wilson
... it was in VirtualDub and in TvTime since like forever.
:-)
TVTime had the absolute best motion adaptive de-interlace filter I'd ever seen... and my CPU usage was decent. I only wanted to watch cable TV on my PC the picture looked so good.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I said VirtualDub when I meant DScaler.
The motion compensation algorithm is based off Tom's Mocomp and it's been in tvtime for as long as I've been using it (at least 18 months).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON