I use a Sigma Designs Hollywood DVD Decoder card which cost me $45 and plays flawlessly with it's accompanying software.
I haven't found a single software decoder which works as well.
ATI has been building hardware decoders into their video cards which work with Cinemaster for many years. That is how they maintained such a large share of the OEM video card market for so long until Nvidia took much of it away from them.
Either way I would consider a hardware decoder unless your PCI slots are maxed out.
John
Former user
wrote on 6/17/2003, 2:51 PM
I recently bought an ATI Xpert 2000 card for my slower computer ($32 US). It has the built in MPEG decoder for DVD's and I use PowerDVD. It came with my DVD rom drive. They look and work great.
PowerDVD is excellent. It has presets for changing color, brightness, and contrast, changes speeds with the scroll wheel, and can go down to 1/4 speed for analyzing effects and motion.
I haven't used WinDVD very much so maybe it has the same functions.
PowerDVD is also the only software DVD player to display interlaced fields properly. With every other player you lose half the temporal resolution. This doesn't matter so much if you're watching movies or progressive footage, but if you're watching stuff in 60i (video camera footage, etc.) it does.
Since Power DVD added the ability to play DVD file sets, it is the best...in my opinion.
WinDVD does have some nice features, but Power DVD seems to have the best image quality...which is great if you are doing DVD screen/frame image captures.
Plus, if you're already a Power DVD owner, the upgrade price is cheaper then the WinDVD new purchase.
Interesting, on my computer (ATI All-in-Wonder video card, 19" screen at 1280x1024) I found that WinDVD looked significantly better on interlaced video than PowerDVD. Both products can play DVD filesets from folders, which is all I use them for (testing DVD projects prior to burning a disc). WinDVD can play from 50% to 200% speed in 5% increments and does pitch-preserving audio resampling on the fly (maybe PowerDVD can as well, haven't tried). It can also go at 20x speed but no audio in that mode.
WinDVD may be less forgiving of incorrectly formatted DVD VOBs, but that might be an advantage if you're trying to make a standard-compliant disc that will play in most standalone players.
You also may want to try buying of the inexpensive DVD players from a place like Walmart and use that to test them. I assume you have an external monitor at your edit bay or at least a television nearby. I have a hardware decoder as I described above, but I use my standalone DVD player for testing much more often.
John
We've been using the freebie from Ensonic, but it's starting to show some annoying limitations.
I downloaded WinDVD and PowerDVD this morning, and installed WinDVD version 5. V 5 of PowerDVD is due out shortly, as well.
WinDVD v 5 impressed the heck out of me right away. V 5 was released yesterday. I'll probably use it for my main mpg viewer, as well. There are some features that I haven't found yet, such as optimizing the display for your device (CRT or LCD monitor) and I want to learn more about the various viewing speed options. For five minutes of playing "What's this button do," though, I was pretty pleased. Changing the FFD/Reverse speeds with the mouse wheel is kinda neat, but I wonder if that's configurable. I may not want to jump straight from 2x to 8x, and I'd like it to allow slowing down to 1x with a simple click, too. Clicking the "Play" button works, of course, but can I program on of the side buttons on my Explorer mouse? Things to look into.....
I'll mess with PowerDVD this evening. One thing that I'll do is to use each of them to take the same screen grab, and examine the results. I don't need that often, but when I do, I don't want something fuzzy and dim.
I find the controls a bit non-intuitive. When you're in full screen mode, how do you bring up the little skin module thingie that allows you to jump chapters, drag the slider, set play speed, etc? I don't mean the thing at the top of the frame the appears when you put your mouse up there; I mean the floating thing you can drag around and minimize (which hides it completely in full screen). I usually have to click a number of times at the bottom, sorta below the screen, for the control thingie to appear.
Thanks in advance.
G
Former user
wrote on 6/18/2003, 12:46 PM
Erk, right click on the screen and you get most of those controls.