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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!'"
- Don't connect it to the Internet
- Don't turn it off
No problem.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No of course they aren't if a media PC just played DVD players, but it does a whole lot more than that doesn't it?
First of all I assume that you have a 480i TV, or if you are lucky a 480p CRT. If that is all you have for a display of course the $60 is plenty for a DVD player. In fact if all you have is an standard TV then I would say you over paid for that DVD player. Amazon has players with decent features at less than $30.
However if you have a 720p 42-60in Plasma/LCD/DLP or a 1080p 60in+ then you will probably not be happy with that $60 DVD player. You will either want to get an upconverting DVD player that can display at least 720p with a decent output or build a Media PC. Oppo makes a decent upconverting player that competes with much more expensive players for less than $200 and even has a nice remote. You can build a media PC that also does the upconverting and de-interlacing for you and does it for DVDs and recorded TV programs making even regular old standard TV better for probably $300 or so. Given that the vast majority of Cable is still standard TV upconverting and de-interlacing can help make it look a lot better. In essence you get more for your cable subscription then you would otherwise. So the price of the media PC has to be factored into the overall improvement in image quality you can get.
So to recap the features of a Media PC over a DVD player $30-$2000.
- Store TV on hard disks for later time shifted viewing, commercial skipping and other nice features
- User upgradeable storage
- Remote file server support so you can store the disks in another room (MythTV)
- Upconvert and de-interlace DVD content for display on HDTV quality screens and do so better than dedicated players with inexpensive NVIDIA or ATI cards
- Upconvert and de-interlace regular SDTV and recorded content
- Provide PC like features like instant weather, web browsing, weeks of TV schedules, MP3 player with visualizer output to the TV, etc...
- Wireless serving of files to other devices
A Media PC is a very cost effective solution to provide a whole host of services to you TV viewing. If you are also in a position to have the knowhow to deploy a complex MythTV setup even better. Labor is cost of course but being a geek, and better yet a linux geek does have its advantages...
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.)
Something by M-Audio, such as the Revolution 7.1, might fit your bill.
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