ATI and nVidia Crush High-End DVD Players 280
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!'"
No shit! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why stand alone DVDs are preferable: (Score:4, Informative)
- Don't turn it off
No problem.
List of players + final scores. (Score:2, Informative)
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...
difference in video players (Score:3, Informative)
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 [blogspot.com].
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
Re:Eh. (Score:3, Informative)
First of all I assume that you have a 480i TV, or if you are lucky a 480p CRT. If that is all you have for a display of course the $60 is plenty for a DVD player. In fact if all you have is an standard TV then I would say you over paid for that DVD player. Amazon has players with decent features at less than $30.
However if you have a 720p 42-60in Plasma/LCD/DLP or a 1080p 60in+ then you will probably not be happy with that $60 DVD player. You will either want to get an upconverting DVD player that can display at least 720p with a decent output or build a Media PC. Oppo makes a decent upconverting player that competes with much more expensive players for less than $200 and even has a nice remote. You can build a media PC that also does the upconverting and de-interlacing for you and does it for DVDs and recorded TV programs making even regular old standard TV better for probably $300 or so. Given that the vast majority of Cable is still standard TV upconverting and de-interlacing can help make it look a lot better. In essence you get more for your cable subscription then you would otherwise. So the price of the media PC has to be factored into the overall improvement in image quality you can get.
So to recap the features of a Media PC over a DVD player $30-$2000.
- Store TV on hard disks for later time shifted viewing, commercial skipping and other nice features
- User upgradeable storage
- Remote file server support so you can store the disks in another room (MythTV)
- Upconvert and de-interlace DVD content for display on HDTV quality screens and do so better than dedicated players with inexpensive NVIDIA or ATI cards
- Upconvert and de-interlace regular SDTV and recorded content
- Provide PC like features like instant weather, web browsing, weeks of TV schedules, MP3 player with visualizer output to the TV, etc...
- Wireless serving of files to other devices
A Media PC is a very cost effective solution to provide a whole host of services to you TV viewing. If you are also in a position to have the knowhow to deploy a complex MythTV setup even better. Labor is cost of course but being a geek, and better yet a linux geek does have its advantages...
Glad to hear it (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Uhm (Score:2, Informative)
Also a few things you, and apparently a lot of people here are not considering, that is not everyone is like you.
For $30-$70 all you get in a DVD player is a 480i or 480p output. That is great if you are running SDTV to an older CRT. However if you are running a HDTV even 480p is painful to watch and letting the HDTV TV do the upconverting is never the best and worse, it can introduce a sync problem between the video and audio that can be hard to eliminate if you use a reciever to manager your audio.
Upconverting does happen when you display SDTV on any HDTV device and image quality is highly dependent on the quality of the upconvert and de-interlace
According to this articule inexpensive video cards for less than $60 give you all the features of the higher end 3D gaming cards and they come with smaller fans or passive coolers. That is really good news for Media PC builders.
If you are going home to plain old SDTV then of this article is not for you. However if you are going home to a high quality HDTV Plasma/LCD/DLP or similar then it should be very much of interest as this does not only mean better DVD viewing and longer life to your DVD collection in the face of HDDVD and BlueRay but also means the SDTV signal on cable can be effectively de-interlaced and upconverted to give you more value for your monthly cable $$.
So of course, if you go out and buy a $400 CRT SDTV then do not build a $300-$500 media PC unless you really like how they do time shifting and other features. However if you spend $2000-$3000 on the display and then go and buy a $30 DVD player, well that is just dumb.
Very very loud (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:What about linux? (Score:1, Informative)
Sure. Just compile and install mplayer (http://mplayerhq.hu/ [mplayerhq.hu]) and shoot :
good wire article (Score:2, Informative)
Frame rate issues kill this though... (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
Summary for the comments (Score:2, Informative)
- $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.
Re:$2000 DVD Players (Score:2, Informative)
Seriously, I can't speak for the video crowd but I have never felt bad about putting out the additional cash for good headphones. they sound better, they last longer and components are replaceable. This makes all the difference for me and for hundreds of thousands of "headphones only" music snobs all over the world.
Re:Slightly off topic question (Score:2, Informative)
Even with a supportive vendor, getting drivers built by "the community" is slow; someone sitting in their room fiddling with a card on the weekends is going to take a lot longer (and probably do a worse job) then a guy whose job it is to develop to do this (and a guy that has the people who built the card 2 doors down).
Re:Not all gold plated connectors are expensive... (Score:3, Informative)
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....
Re:How loud are they? (Score:3, Informative)
Great sound AND it includes the wifemuting feature.
Re:Went that way, switched back (Score:3, Informative)
All these are PEBKAC errors...
Buy an IR reciever for $15, and use it with ANY REMOTE you have, to control your PC (just configure LIRC for it).
Use MPlayer (a GUI would just get in the way).
Then just write a script that will start playing your DVD when you press a button on the remote... One that will open your filemanager to the folder with all your videos, etc.
A beginner can put it all together in a couple days. Someone who has done it before can set it up in a couple hours.
Why did you even want to upgrade your drivers? Once you get it working, leave it alone. As long as your doing it with something non-Windows, it will continue to chug along for years to come, if you don't fool with it.
PEBKAC
Re:There is more to movies than pictures (Score:4, Informative)
Something by M-Audio, such as the Revolution 7.1, might fit your bill.
Re:Frame rate issues kill this though... (Score:3, Informative)
The effect you're complaining about is judder, not "pulldown". Pulldown is the process through which judder is introduced.
Movies on a dvd are telecined, whereby 24fps video is encoded at 30fps as shown in this wikipedia diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Three-two_pull
The judder created by this encoding scheme is not compounded by watching a movie on a PC unless your dvd player is absolute crap. The same goes with sound sync issues. I find it laughable that you consider such defects common in PCs, when an abundant amount of evidence to the contrary is present.
Reversing the telecine process is rather simple, and most players do so to reconstruct a 480p from from the 480i dvd source material. Meaning that your PC is working with a 24fps source.
In order to eliminate judder on your PC, set your refresh rate to a multiple of 24 (72hz or 120hz would be the most common refresh rates available). You don't need to set your refresh rate as low as 24hz.
Unfortunately, there are very few HD displays that ACCEPT input at rates other than 60hz. So you're still stuck with the level of judder you'd receive from a standalone player on those displays.
Re:I have RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
For a regular old 480i signal, you should see very obvious color and luminance bleeding in the composite signal vs S-Video or component. Put something like the DVD player's setup menu on the screen then switch between inputs. Look at the edges of text or edges between white and black areas. Your player ought to be able to output component and composite at the same time so you can really get a good idea of what the difference is.
If the image does not appear different and if you get the same types of artifacts with the component cables that you would normally expect with composite, you may have a problem with your CRT that could be remedied with some internal adjustments.