DVD -Do I need a decoder card to play movies?

[Cavalier Ed]

I recently spent £60 ($90) on a 12x DVD rom as I needed a new cd rom anyway. I have a tbird 850-18.5Gb HDD and 290Mb RAM and use an ATI rage 16Mb gagp graphics card. However DVD does not play smoothly. retailer says "come and spend another £60 on a hollywood decoder card". A friend has a pIII 500Mhz with 128Mb ram but has a tnt voodo graphics card . His DVD roms play fine. Am I missing something?

[blubomber]

Are you using any decoder software now? If so, which one? I use SoftDVD Max made by MGI. I play DVD movies just fine with no problems at all. how about updated drivers for your video card? Here is my setup;

Duron 650@850
128 MB PC-100 Ram
15 gig IBM ATA-100
Diamond Viper II
Toshiba 5X DVD

[skuz]

Usually, ATI cards are among the best DVD playback cards, but since these cards have to do other things, designers have to make some compromises.

On the other hand, I remember back in late 98 I did a speech about new technologies (my case was DVD-ROMs). I had a 2x DVD and a dedicated MPEG decoder card. I used the most powerful machine we had in the lab (Pentium 133, 24 Mb RAM) and everything was as smooth as it would look on a tape on TV.

[marc666]

get power dvd it will run with almost any agp card

[hotrodder]

do you have dma enabled on the dvd

[RayH]

You may have to update both your video DRIVERS and the DVD Player from ATI. ATI might want $10 US for the Player upgrade. The video drivers are available on line, but the DVD Player has to come mail order. Even w/o DMA, the player works just fine w/my 450 MHz system. Also, have you checked out your firmware?

[AndreRIO]

i have a delta 12x dvd (no decoder), would adding a decoder card improve the picture quality?

[Socio]

Get Cyberlink's PowerDVD, you don't need a decoder, you don't even need a DVD player, it will play mpeg 1 and mpeg 2 right off your harddrive or CD.

Yes, A good decoder card will improve pitcture quality, and most if not all of them will also allow you to connect your DVD to your TV for playback

[T-Bird]

I just bought a Radeon 32MB DDR card. The ATi DVD software didnt run good at all in my system. I installed PowerDVD, and bingo... Great DVD playback.

[pin-monkey]

I have a Doo-Doo3 2000 and an ATI at ply 98
both in the same system and the ATI is slower for just about any graphical output.

With my old system (k6-2 500) dvd was at best on the ATI card jumpy the Voo-doo was smooth with a skip every now and then.

I have upgraded to a T-bird 1G and it plays just as well as my Actual DVD machine.

As stated before what are your dma settings?

And what is your AGP apature set at?(should be close to 1/2 your RAM with out going over).

This is with a 10X DVD drive. Although the speed of the drive will be the same for video as the speed rating is for data transfer and I have not noticed an increase in performance with a faster drive (I also have a 16x)

This is WITHOUT a decoder card. And win-dvd software for playback.


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[This message has been edited by pin-monkey (edited 03-15-2001).]

[Cavalier Ed]

Hi Guys,
My dma access is enabled and I'm using power dvd software program. I dont know about AGP aperture settings (re;pin monkey)what is this?.

[AndreRIO]

excuse me cavalier ed
how good is the picture quality? is it like tv? (for the decoder card)


[This message has been edited by AndreRIO (edited 03-18-2001).]