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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
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
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.
- Don't connect it to the Internet
- Don't turn it off
No problem.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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
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.
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 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:
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...
.... :(
-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
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
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.
Gold is a relatively poor conductor compared to silver (or even copper, really). Gold is used for plating contacts because it doesn't tarnish, so if you clean your connectors regularly (or even rewire things once in a while), non-gold connectors are technically slightly better.
So what you really meant is "Gold connectors are better for lazy people." :-D
DeoxIt is your friend....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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?
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.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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
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?