Slashdot Mirror
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!'"
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.
"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.
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