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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!'"
My DVD player costs $55 and it produces images of the same quality of the more commom $150 ones.
Mine cost me something like $20-$30. Works perfectly, plays everything from DVDs (all regions!) to mp3s and jpegs and has Scart, RCA, VGA video output. And 5.1 (or maybe even 7.1!) sound output.
The only thing I don't like is that the remote control isn't really easy to use for tasks other than play/pause/menu navigation.
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.
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.
Use liquid cooling. IMHO it's much closer to silent than any fan that can compete at the same level. Also, if you get the right kind of waterblocks then your media centre can still be rather compact. Depending on how much you'd like to cool down the card you would have the choice between active cooling with a radiator and large quiet fans/fan, or you could go with passive cooling and have a near silent machine at expense of cooling ability.
Nirokato
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
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
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.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The article is referring to only one thing: picture quality. And unless you've got a decent HDTV with DVI/HDMI inputs that can do at least 720p, you are not going to see any difference between a $20 DVD player and a high-end HTPC.
My HTPC is connected to my DLP HDTV via DVI and the picture is so amazing that it looks almost three-dimensional (and this is with an ancient ATI Radeon 8500 card).
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?
yeah, mplayer and linux ....
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.,,,, and then my weekend becomes a debugging spree, turning my dey off into a working day ...
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being a linux admin since linux IS, I would say that that is the very last option I would want for myself
first of all: i do not have "movie files" I only watch DVDs. they have menus, I want a GUI for them to use the features.
last time I checked Mplayer still did not have DVD menus, and took long to find the CCS keys (since linux players still do not have a "legal player".
2nd: i use a surround AMP, last time it was 4 years ago when i started messing with ALSA's SPDIF output. Thanks but no thanks, half the "files" did not have ac3 audio, and DVDs had problems as well, that might have changed. For me SPDIF out is the ONLY option, and if I cannot watch in at least digi 5.1 or DTS i do not want to consider even putting the disc in.
3rd: as i said, said machine was a gaming rig. Given that, you NEED to upgrade drivers very frequently. There is no option no to. You get performance issues, and all kinds of problems if you do not.
So do not misunderstand me: as soon as Linux has a decent DVD player (mean commercial without the CCS crap), and it support native HDTV modes and SPDIF optical out, I will put one together
Yep I know LIRC is kickass, mplayer is kickass, linnux is kickass, and I can put all this together just fine, it's just that at the end I still won't have DVD menus, and maybe not have DTS sound, and ohh, maybe not be able to play the movie
yes it happened recently, that the CCS lib could not do anything with 2 rental movies, that I wanted to archive onto my laptop, to watch it on the weekend away from the house !!!
So yes, all that is wonderful, but these give me 10x the problems, as soon as my wife will pop in a DVD and ask: so why does not that DVD play/have sound/crappy picture on the projector
and yes, i love linux and all that, but the LAST thing i want to use it for is to run a home entertainment center on it with HDTV DTS and DVD needs
A GUI has nothing at all to do with DVD menus. Your DVD player certainly doesn't have a GUI at all.
It's not officially part of MPlayer yet, but the dvdnav patch has been working fine for probably 6 months now.
Besides, I just prefer MPlayer. You certainly can use Xine via a remote control quite easily, if you prefer that over MPlayer.
It's been 4+ years since that was the situation. Unless you have explictly disabled mplayer's built-in CSS support (dvdkit2) when you compiled it, DVDs are decrypted instantly.
I'm not sure what "messing" you were doing 4 years ago. These days, it's just a question of telling the player to use hwac3 output (for AC3 or DTS), and everything just works.
As I said: PEBKAC. It's a terrible idea, all around. PC gaming and movie viewing are far too different to coexist without such "issues".
You're a few years late.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
" A GUI has nothing at all to do with DVD menus. Your DVD player certainly doesn't have a GUI at all."
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:) :)
... or the NVIDIA driver just dumps core, and crashes my card so bad, no XDM/KDM/GDM restart is possible, and have to restart the whole crap ...
... it is also very stable (NOT THAT MUCH) and plays ALMOST all the movies. It's just that sometimes the subtitles have wrong encoding, they do not work, or are just unreadable, or do not fit ...
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:) so I stay with my hardware box until things are different ...
A DVD menu is a graphical representation of the content on your disc and a user interface, so it is a Graphical User Interface for the disc = GUI
My dvd player has a GUI in fact that works by a remote control to set all the features up:)
What I meant with "messing" was that a good few years ago, the SPDIF out wasn't just a recompile of the kernel to include the drivers for your audio card, but a painful procedure, and than at many times I ended up sound not being decoded the way they were on a hw player.
I am happy, mplayer gets a DVD menu, and if I wanted to I could have used Xine (you mentioned) or even OGLE.
But that still does not make the CCS problem go away, that I have experienced just by randomly inserting 1 out of 50 discs into my linux machine (where I many times peek into movies BTW, so I do not have to turn on the projector and all the sound devices)
Mplayer (compiled a few months ago, HAD a problem playing some of the disks, along with xine and OGLE, and it was a CCS error....
so you can throw PEBKAC and all the insults, if using linux for that was an easier solution i would do that
besides: sharing a game machine, and the video playing was the best option, given the location of the hardware in the room, and the number of connections my audio devices allow.
Now can you answer me this honestly (as you seem to think you MUST PUSH using linux for something I gave up years ago):
Can you use a HDTV output of an NVIDIA card, without using the NON-binary driver of Xorg ? I do not know, but while the binary driver is so crappy, that I had to put a matrix450 back into my wirk machine to restore system stability, I would say: i do not think so.
You know that the binary driver still does not allow safe suspend and hybernation, and is super unstable when using xinerama ?
I am not going to fight with you over this stupid issue of whether I must force myself to use linux on EVERITHING possible
as i am sitting 12+hours daily looking at my machine running X and Linux
I know it rocks, and can do a lot, but I still haven't found a solution, that makes me go : wow, I must run that as my media player, it supports EVERYTHING I want, and it is super stable.
Instead I find this: I can hack hours with LIRC, MPLAYER, X, NVIDIA DRIVERS, and when my test DVDs are playing just fine, I will put that rental in and : SEGFAULT XXXXX cannot find whatever CCS shit
And yes, there are prepackaged versions: such as XBOX media center
little small problems, that I would have tolerated 5 years ago when I just wanted to use Linux for EVERYTHING just as you now, but now I better focus on whatever gives the best solution, and leave the hacking for projects I enjoy after all, not make my life more miserable, when I just want to lay back, press the button and watch a movie WITH DTS, IN HDTV, correct subtitles, and aspect ratio
But hey, not flaming, I am happy if all that works for you on linux on any given hardware and any distro,
For me it seems more like even the drivers do not seem to work that are officially distributed with the hardware on windows at this time
cheers
When drives are just available for sale at Newegg, 1TB is only $300. Well, 960GB, close a-friggen-nuff.
I must agree though. A media server is a godsend, especially for those with large content libraries. Mine still needs work in the organization and interface front, but even quality aside, the simplicity of not needing to look for the case is awesome. I rip all my movies to XviD at "lossless" settings (100% quality, dunno if it technically would be on a difference map, but I sure can't tell a difference) and get files around the 2.5GB mark, so I can pack in 300 movies and a large stock of music in a reasonably compact system, and have it accessable all over the house. Playback always tends to be a bit wonky for me in the audio department, probably something to do with attempting DDL encoding alongside a DD5.1/dts passthrough, but video quality is excellent even without the countless filter settings.
And my $50 DVD player does indeed truly suck as far as output quality goes, not to mention the fact that it doesn't run AnyDVD so I can't skip all of the stupid UPO'd crap. The interface isn't a problem (except that I never have a good place to put it) - it's basically one set-up and then play/pause. In fact, the only reason that I have it is because I want something that I know won't have software issues and not suck down a couple hundred watts of power to play a movie. Well, that and the fact that I had to leave for school, and I just don't have room for that many computers in my dorm.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?