This page gets its first update in almost 2 years!

To keep you updated, I have completed the majority of benchmark testing in my DVD-accelerator roundup-review. The roundup covers VGA-cards that have DVD-acceleration. In this report, "DVD-acceleration" means a minimum of hardware motion-compensation. A few reviewed cards manage to meet this requirement barely. A few others greatly exceeded the minimum with extra hardware, like DVD-subpicture blending and hardware-iDCT. Topics covered by the round-up review include: Accelerator performance (CPU usage), accelerator image-quality, accelerator support (player software), and accelerator availability (by desktop video mode.)

Here's a preliminary document : low-end PCDVD report (updated 03/22/2001)

This page is like a diary of my experiences with PC-based DVD-playback. I started it back when I was in graduate school. Unlike today's grad-student, I didn't bring a TV or VCR with me to college. Rather then spend extra time studying like I should, I bought a PC-DVD kit from Creative Labs, and that became my entertainment center. For 2 quarters, I stuck to watching DVD movies on a PC monitor and a pair of cheap headphones. While it wasn't quite the 'DVD experience', it beat studying and going to sleep early.

Now about the Creative DXR2 kit. Frys sold refurbished kits for $150, making it the cheapest kit at the time I made my purchase, back in early 1999. My PC had an AMD K6/2-300 CPU, which I'd learn was too slow for software-DVD. For a while, I used the DXR2 decoder board, but its passthrough VGA-quality was absolutely terrible. First, it blurred the entire Windows desktop, even when the DVD-card wasn't active. Second, DVD-playback (through the VGA monitor) was extremely pixellated and color-washed. In terms of image quality, the video looked closer to VideoCD than DVD. Ultimately, these bad qualities motivated me to dump the DXR2 card, and switch over to software-based DVD playback.

SoftDVD covers software DVD players and any general PC hardware (VGA adapter, sound card, CPU, etc.) that contributes to this process. "Dedicated solutions" (hardware DVD kits) and "special hardware" (MPACT2, etc.) are not covered. I'm not trying to write a book here, but just to share my experiences with those interested. Hopefully my experiences will benefit some of you folks.

There are several different ways to get DVD-movies to play on a PC:

1) The "DVD upgrade kit." The kit is the combo of DVDROM drive and dedicated DVD-decoder board. Both devices are required to be installed into the PC. With this setup, the PC's processor does minimal work. The decoder-board is responsible for most/all decoding tasks (content decryption, DVD navigation, audio/video decoding, video display.) The DVD-kit allows the slowest Pentium PCs to serve as a DVD-player.

2) The "softDVD player." DVD-playback is done mostly or entirely in software, on the PC's processor. The word 'softDVD' is meant to distinguish between PCs with and without the dedicated hardware decoder-board. (A PC with a decoder-board performs 'hardware' decoding. A PC without a decoder-board performs 'software' decoding.) Generally, a modern (500MHz + ) PC with DVDROM drive will handle softDVD acceptably.

The type of VGA card greatly influences the quality of the decoded-video. An accelerated-VGA card has special circuit blocks (like 'hardware motion compensation') to offload some video decoding tasks, reducing the load on the CPU. The ATI Rage Pro, S3 Savage, SiS6326DVD, ATI Rage128, and Nvidia Geforce are accelerated-VGA cards. Others include the Rage128, Radeon, PowerVR Kyro, Trident Blade3D, and SiS-30x. Unaccelerated-VGA cards (Matrox, 3DFX) are perfectly compatible with softDVD, but require faster CPUs to play the same DVD content.

As of 2001, virtually all new PCs (and laptops) with DVD-capability rely on softDVD to provide this feature.

In general, you'll need a pretty powerful PC with good all-around hardware.

To even launch most softDVD programs, and some programs will still refuse to load, you'll need at least the following:

• CPU with MMX instructions
• 16-bit stereo soundcard
• 4MB PCI or AGP VGA card with Directdraw support
• 32MB RAM
• 1X DVD-ROM drive

In my experience, the published minimum requirements fall short of the actual practical minimum requirements: For consistent, smooth DVD playback, you'll want a PC with these minimum specs:

• 450MHz CPU (AMD K6/2, CeleronA, or Pentium II)
• PCI soundcard
• 8MB AGP VGA card (preferably with DVD-acceleration)
• 64MB PC100 RAM
• 2X DVD-ROM or faster

The importance of each hardware component will be discussed in detail. 

As of 2001, virtually all new PCs (and laptops) meet the baseline requirement for softDVD.

I've moved the software DVD benchmark page to a separate document. Remember, its target audience is experienced/advanced users.

Although this information is outdated, I have a page just for Savage3D users

I'd like to cover some of the other DVD players. But alas, my aged hardware doesn't work with Cinemaster, and my limited budget prevents me from buying more computer junk.

Screenshot section to graphically explain aspect ratios. (This page is down.)

• http://www.activewin.com/dvd - review of software players, PC-DVD news
• http://www.inmatrix.com - home of DVDGenie, one of the tweak utilities used in my testing
• http://www.webartz.com/fourcc - Overview of YUV pixel formats (for Directdraw overlay surfaces)

• http://www.hollywood.com - MPEG-2 VOB clips (The Big Hit, Dark City, Lost In Space, Wedding Singer)
• http://entertainment.simplenet.com/ - another movie clip site
• ftp://ftp.xingtech.com - one VOB clip and some MPEG-1 clips
• http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_3/dvd-benchmark-introduction-9-2000.html - excellent introductory article

© 2001 03/22/2001 liaor@iname.com