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!'"

Crushed?

Damn, those heatsinks are just getting too big!

Uhm

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?

--

Re:Uhm

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.

Re:Uhm

They separate the gullible from their money. That is what they do for $2000.

Re:Uhm

Oh yes, but really, the whole experiance is a waste if you don't connect your speakers with $2500 cable: http://www.audioadvisor.com/store/productdetail.as p?sku=CARGRS3&loc=2 [audioadvisor.com]

Re:There is more to movies than pictures

Now, if only one could get a decent sound card to do discrete 7.1 channel output with digital decoding (preferrably hardware decoding) for an affordable price, that whole media PC idea might actually gain some ground in the marketplace.

Something by M-Audio, such as the Revolution 7.1, might fit your bill.

No shit!

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.

How loud are they?

The fan on that ATI card looks loud.... I think the DVD player would be quieter.

Re:How loud are they?

Of course, if you don't like the noise, you could wear noise blanking headphones.

Right... because those that want a high quality picture don't really care to use the 5.1 sound system they also have installed...

Oh sure, "PC's" and "LCD" television..

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.

trend

time for a networking home server ?

$2000 DVD Players

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.

Re:$2000 DVD Players

Yes they can, but the universe will fire back by creating bigger morons next generation.

The issue here is that humanity has separated itself from the good ol' natural selection, thus morons don't get booted out of the gene pool anymore.

Worse, so few morons die that we actually have to give them awards [darwinawards.com] to try and get other morons to follow suit!

Except for all the fan noise

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.

Practicality

Why buy expensive when you can build for cheaper? Wow, never heard that question before.

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.

Not a valid comparison for a typical family

"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.

Re:Not a valid comparison for a typical family

If you're cheap like I am, the comparison is extremely one-sided the other way. $50 DVD player vs. $500 media PC.

But that means using a media center PC

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.

Eh.

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.

"Conclusion"

"Final scores

The total score for nVidia ends up being 93, where the total ATI score is 118. Both scores [hometheaterblog.com] [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]"

What about linux?

Is any of this fancy pants video processing capability usuable under linux? It had better be, after all the PR about how nvidia's drivers share around 98% of their code between the windows and linux versions.

I've had enough problems with bugs in their linux drivers (demonstrably broken dual-channel dvi configuration), that I could have fixed with access to source code, that I expect something for having to put up with their BS. If they can't even make the video processing available under linux, I might as well stick with the old ATI cards which do have fully open driver source.

DVR

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!'

There are actually a lot of people using PC as DVR for the longest time... nothing's surprising really.

This plus cheap DVD isoification?

I wonder how cost-effective at this point it would be to simply store DVDs lock stock and barrel on drive arrays and view them on HTPCs. I want the best possible image and all menus and features of DVD, not just rips.

And I also wonder if the Sony XL1B2 [engadget.com] Firewire changer is fully-supported in Linux? Cuz this would be a no-brainer sale for me if I could hook it up to a Myth box...

It is amazing...

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.

XBMC

I still have not found anything that will beat an XBox with Xbox Media Center (URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBMC) and an HDTV cable upgrade.

DVMobile?

With 16GB USB sticks that can hold at least 2 movies, we can walk up to most PCs without even needing a DVD player on them for basic playback. But what's the highest end USB TV decoder we can carry to friends' houses, without carrying the delicate/bulky PC that they already have?

What about interlacing?

Haven't tried these cards yet (too poor :) ), but most dvd players I've used are pretty lousy at deinterlacing (xine wasn't too bad, but installing linux is more work than I want to do right now).

I have RTFA

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.

Glad to hear it

I've had my PC hooked up to my HDTV ever since PureVideo was released. I went right out and bought two 6600GT's as fast as I could (have since upgrade due to one of the 6600GT's going bad). I couldn't be happier with the DVD output, but I hate having to start up my computer just to watch a DVD some time. You have to run Windows (I normally use Unix based computers), and it takes almost 5 minutes to boot sometimes, depending on what new Anti-Virus, Spyware, System updates there are, and also what other programs decide to run at boot. I still have these troubles even though I have a top-of-the-line PC running Media Center 2005. I'm really waiting for Apple to release a Mac mini CoreDuo with PureVideo and then I'll gladly be able to format my current media center!

Slightly off topic question

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.

Went that way, switched back

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:

-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 purely software decoders?

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?

Future features of Graphic Cards....

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!"

Bleeding edge discovery...

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!

Hey article, 2001 called, it wants its timely advice back!

Frame rate issues kill this though...

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.)

Summary for the comments

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.

How about SACD support?

A lot of the other comments cover reasons why using a PC might not be the best even if the video quality is superior. One thing I want to add is SACD support. My $500 Denon DVD player will play SACDs in addition to all the various DVD things, progressive scan output, etc. I haven't found anything PC or Mac based that will do this. MLP too, but that's less of a concern.

Let me be the first to say...

Duh.

A PC is not worth the effort...

I bought a $50 DVD player at Costco that does a great job. A "Media Center PC" means a Windows PC to play the DVD (for most people). Those graphics would have to be damned good to make anyone want to screw around with any PC running any version of Windows just to play a DVD. Never mind the hardware cost, or even the M$ software cost. No, the real cost of the system would be the time with updates, disk management, hardware updates, software updates, activation crap, spyware, viruses, scripting agents, etc. etc. I can imagine someone hooking up the MPC as a novelty for a short amount of time but then leaving it turned off in the corner after a while when the MPC needed whatever, and just using the DVD player. There's no way Microsoft could ever make Windows into powerful software that any normal person would want to use every day for something like playing DVDs, watching TV or keeping the beer cold. Using your PC to watch TV might work and it's cute, but TV sales are not suffering any.

It's inevitable that digital equipment will integrate more entertainment and household functions but it will never happen with anything called 'Windows' produced by any company named 'Microsoft.' They've been milking the Windows/Office cash cow for so long that they're unable to do anything else. For those kinds of devices to take off, they'll have to support open standards and protocols, be offered by several different large companies, and be simple and inexpensive to use. Maybe Sony, Nintendo, Toshiba, Panasonic, or HP could be players. Microsoft...no way.

Boneheaded article...

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 [oppodigital.com]

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...

Awesome, where can I get the 400 disc carousel

Oh, you say you can't get a 400 disc carousel to fit in my case for $50? Bummer, 'cause I need space for my discs, and the safest place is in a jukebox. Sure, I could rip all those DVDs and store them on disc, but that would take 2.8TB of disc space, and even at .30/GB I can buy two 400 disc jukeboxes for the price of the hard drives to store one. Why would I spend $500-600 on a box, plus $350 to $600 on the video cards they tested, to do the job of a $60 player, or the $500+$350+$850 (suprise: $1700) to get the equivalent storage of a $300 jukebox? This assumes that there is no value behind the time it takes to set up such a server.

Oh, two other questions - can someone who has never seen this box walk up, turn the TV on, and press play on the remote? Can this be done in the 5 minutes it takes to set up the standalong player?

DVD player still way cheaper

I can't see paying more than a couple hundred $$ for a standalone DVD player these days. Judging from my recent visit to the super electronics store nearby, I can even get an upconverting playback DVD all-format recorder for that. How much would I pay for the ATI/Nvidia card? $400 or more? And then the computer to plug it into? While there may be some quality difference, I can't imagine that price/performance ratio makes sense beyond $200 or so for a DVD player in any form, so I can't imagine going the PC route to watch movies on my TV from the argument of picture quality.

I spent s good bit more than $200 on my MythTV box, but that gets me far more capabilities than a DVD player offers.

Is it due to the PC's resolution?

So maybe someone with more knowledge can answer this. I remember reading a few years back that there was some company modding DVD players to output firewire at full DVD resolution (720x480 or some such). The studios were torqued because the licensing for DVD players said they could only put out standard def. It's been a while so the details are fuzzy though. Is it due to the PC's putting out the DVD's at the native 720x480 resolution while the DVD players are forced to downsample the video? Are there DVD players that can now output full resolution to an HDTV?

Mostly Worthless Tests

While many of the HQV tests from Silicon Optix are useful (the 2:2 and 3:2 cadence, the jaggies), some of those other tests (6:4, 5:5, 2:2:3:2) are so rare they really are almost never going to apply to users. Just because the video cards can detect obscure cadence you will never use, doesn't mean they will work better for you in day-to-day use. Also, there is a good market for a $2,000 DVD player out there. If you've spent $3-10,000 on a projector, a ton on your sound system, and your DVD player is the source for all of this, you're going to see all the errors on the screen much better than on your 20" LCD, much like you'll hear if it has poor audio better with your high end sound system. If you watch most things on your 27" Sony TV, or your monitor, it's not going to make a bit of difference. If you have a 50"+ screen and can notice all the slight MPEG compression artifacts in HD broadcasts, you're going to want to squeeze out all the detail you can from DVD and other lower resolution sources.

Have you seen the inside of a high-end DVD player?

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

Oh Please

What a crock of a conclusion. They failed to mention the interconnects they used on each system, what it was connected to and if it was properly calibrated. Not to mention, they left out half of what makes a DVD player a DVD player - sound! And how about:

1. Interconnects : A modest component DVD player will have Composite, Component, S-Video, and perhaps DVI/HDMI. Most of the listed video cards do Svideo and DVI only.
2. Audio Inerconnects: The video cards tested don't have audio. A modest player will usually have stereo, 5.1 analog, Coax and Fiber.
3. Audio Formats : A modest DVD player will do PCM, 5.1/7.1 DD or DTS and SACD and usually MP3 audio.
4. Form Factor : If you plan on building a HTPC in the same form factor as a modest DVD player, you'll be paying a bit for it I wager.
5. How will it look on a : Plasma, projector, HD tube, SD tube?
6. Power Consumption : I'd love to see what the total cost of running my 6 year old DVD player is compared to what it could have been with a PC sitting there.
7. Operational Noise : My DVD player is next to completely silent.
8. How about that heat?

Not to mention I haven't had to install a service pack or patch on my DVD player. Ever.

I fail to see how this is news.

Common sense, let alone benchmarks would tell me that my 2 year old, £200 video card would perform better than my 2 year old, £200 DVD player. And to all those folk moaning about the noise and cost of HTPC's - for less than £1000 i could build an almost silent HTPC with 10x the functionality of any standalone DVD player out there.

I know i'm a new member and all, but it seems like we've had 8 slow news days this week.

VLC stats and other media players?

I would have liked to see what results you would get from running VLC as your media player instead of the ati/nvidia software that may not be included with your card, and unable to download for that matter. Would the results change when using a opensource media player?

xbox 360 vs dvd player

Not sure if anyone has mentioned it yet, but by using an xBox 360 you can get a really nice picture while playing a dvd. My bro-in-law uses one bascially just to play dvds. You could say it's pretty close to a Media Center PC.

Note: I am not an MS fanboy or even xbox for that matter. I don't own an xbox, and I also have only purchased Macs my whole life.

WTF?

I wouldn't put a media center PC with the graphics card pictured on the first page. Fans are very distracting when watching a movie. I'd rather stick with a quiet DVD player then a loud PC.

do they?

Do they intend to crush the high end DVD player market the same way that the Empire will crush the resistance with one swift blow?

Nice, but...

The problem is you either need a dedicated machine for movie watching or you have to divy up time on the machine between watching movies and using the machine. I've got a fairly high end graphics card and I'm sure the picture quality is nice but it is far more convenient to simply have a stand alone dvd player. Now building a stand-alone machine might sound like a great deal for as little as 700 USD or however cheap you can slap one together , that is , compared to the 2000 USD machine. But who buys the 2000 USD machine, i'll tell you, morons and people who have so much money they don't know what to spend it on. I mean it is a common fact that your ability to enjoy a film is based solely on the diagonal of your monitor, and of course measuring in cm is much more impressive. This is completely ignoring the administrative aspect, which is, to say the least non trivial. A mac mini might sound like a bargain for a mere 500 USD and well suited for the job but consider its graphics accelerator is not very powerful, hence, the image quality will only be marginally improved, if at all.

Walmart DVD player not OK for HDTV

I would say that if you have a standard def TV, then any Walmart DVD player will do. However, if you have a HDTV and care about video quality, then you have to worry about video upscaling. There is a very noticeable video quality difference between my cheap DVD player, and my HTPC with ffdshow. I also get a lot of use out of my HTPC as its my music server, video server, file server, DVR, high-def gaming console, and DVD player. BTW, why are people so concerned about fan noise. I sit 15 feet away from my HTPC, and my air conditioning is definitely louder than a little fan.

Re:Why stand alone DVDs are preferable:

- Don't connect it to the Internet
- Don't turn it off

No problem.

video card ad

our $200 video card is better then $2000 DVD player*

* dvd drive and computer not included.