Help! DVD playback at 1080i with ATI Radeon 7200?

[Isaac Kuo]

The short version:

Does anyone know a DVD player program much faster than PowerDVD?
I'm suffering choppy 4-8fps playback with PowerDVD.

Thanks!

Isaac Kuo


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The long version:

I'm using an PIII550 Win98 box with ATI Radeon 7200 and
Powerstrip feeding a 4:3 Mistubishi HD set. It took me several
days of frustrating trial and error and internet reading, but I
finally have gotten multiple resolutions to work:

640x480p with 540p timings -- good for 640x480 videos
1280x960i with 1080i timings -- good for viewing pictures
720x480p with 540p timings -- good for 4:3 DVDs
720x720i with 1080i timings -- will be good for anamorphic DVDs

I use the following programs for videos:

Windows Media Player -- .avi and .wmv videos
mplayer (a linux port) -- .avi and .ogm videos
PowerDVD -- DVDs

My problem is with video playback on the interlaced resolutions.
With video hardware acceleration set to the 3rd or 4th notches,
all video playback is stretched vertically by a factor of 2x so
that only the top half of the video shows. This is obviously
unusable.

With hardware acceleration set to the 1st or 2nd notches, then
video playback is correct for mplayer and PowerDVD, but extremely
sluggish. Video playback for Windows Media Player is always 100%
scale, in the lower left corner.

I'm really only concerned with getting DVD playback to work with
interlaced resolutions. With my particular TV, the unusual
letterboxed 720x720i resolution will provide me with
the best anamorphic movie playback. However, without hardware
acceleration it's too choppy. Thus, my options are:

1. Get hardware acceleration to work - Is there a way to do this?
I've tried fiddling with various switches on OpenGL and Direct3D
settings and none of these seem to have any effect. There are
a number of settings in Powerstrip which I don't understand. I
tried switching some of them but so far nothing seems to work.

I'm guessing that whatever hardware function is being used to
scale the video is some sort of "overlay" function. Thus, the
program decodes the video to a piece of video memory at the
original resolution and the video card scales this image to
the desired size on the fly while displaying it. Is that right?
I guess that whatever the video card is doing it's incrementing
by only half as much as it's supposed to on each scanline,
because it's interlaced. Is there some sort of hack to get it
to work properly on interlaced resolutions?

2. Get a more efficient DVD playing program - I use PowerDVD simply
because that's what came with my DVD drive. Any suggestions
for better DVD playback software?

3. Tweak PowerDVD - is this even possible? I've probably overlooked
options which could make it play back faster. However, I
somehow doubt minor tweaks could get it up to speed. Playback
without hardware acceleration is very choppy, varying between
around 4 to 8 frames per second. A tweak which increased speed
by 25% would still be too slow.

4. Get a faster processor - but no one has PIII's any more and
upgrading to a PIV motherboard along with new memory is too
expensive. Also, my motherboard might not support PIII's
faster than 600mhz anyway.

I thank you for your time reading the long version, and would
appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks!

Isaac Kuo

 

[Klaus]

Sounds like you have a slow computer. What speed is your CPU?

 

[Jason]

He has a PIII 550, sounds like that may be the culprit...
more RAM and/or a better video card can help. Also what about a seperate
MPEG decoder card?

 

[Klaus]

He has a PIII 550, sounds like that may be the culprit...

HaHa thanks - I saw the part under his name and automatically thought it
was a signature....

Yeah your CPU is too slow...
1) Upgrade CPU or
2) Get a $40 hollywood plus decoder card.

 

[sheer]

Try Zoom Player and see how that works.

http://www.inmatrix.com/

 

[Isaac Kuo]

Try Zoom Player and see how that works.

http://www.inmatrix.com/

Thanks for the link! It seems that it actually doesn't
include a DVD player at all--it's just a front end for
PowerDVD or any other compatible DVD playing software.

Nevertheless, I may experiment with the freeware version
for playing other videos. It suffers from the same
vertical 2x stretching/cropping that all of the other
media players suffer from in interlaced modes, but there
might be options to get around that (nothing I've fiddled
with in it has fixed it yet).

As with all of the other media players, playback is
smooth and flawless in non-interlaced modes (with
hardware acceleration turned on).

Isaac Kuo

 

[Isaac Kuo]

Well, it's not "the" culprit--with hardware acceleration
turned on, playback is smooth with rare dropped frames.
It looks very nice on the non-interlaced resolutions.
The playback is just as smooth at interlaced resolutions,
but there's some bug/flaw somewhere which makes only
the top half of the image visible and stretches this
top half 2x vertically.

When I disable hardware acceleration, this bug/flaw is
not encountered. However, the additional strain of
doing the image stretching entirely in software makes
PowerDVD very very choppy. Other media types like
DivX .avi files aren't as severely affected, but there
are a lot of dropped frames.

HaHa thanks - I saw the part under his name and automatically thought it
was a signature....

Yeah your CPU is too slow...
1) Upgrade CPU or
2) Get a $40 hollywood plus decoder card.

Thanks--upgrading the CPU is a very expensive option;
I might as well get a whole new computer. PIII's are
not easy to find, and even if I did find one my
motherboard probably can't take one faster than 600.
That leaves me with a motherboard/CPU upgrade, which
would practically be a PIV upgrade. At that point,
I need all new RAM...

That Hollywood Plus decoder card option sounds more
like it, although I still hope to find a solution
which fixes the bug/flaw rather than adding more
hardware.

Thanks again!

Isaac Kuo

 

[Jason]

Isaac, are you running DX 8 or 9? Try upgrading/downgrading and see if that
helps. It may be a DX problem. Hardware acceleration determines if
DirectDraw is on or off. Worth a shot and its free.

 

[chrisv]

I'm using an PIII550 Win98 box with ATI Radeon 7200 and
Powerstrip feeding a 4:3 Mistubishi HD set.

How are you connecting them?

 

[Isaac Kuo]

Isaac, are you running DX 8 or 9? Try upgrading/downgrading
and see if that helps. It may be a DX problem. Hardware
acceleration determines if DirectDraw is on or off. Worth
a shot and its free.

Thanks, it helped a lot!

I couldn't figure out how to check which version of DX was
installed. It certainly wasn't the latest DirectX 9.
After I downloaded/installed DX9, I was able to successfully
use a DX9 only filter option in Zoom Player. It worked!
Now, Zoom Player successfully streches to any resolution
including the interlaced resolutions I had problems with.
Playback at 1280x960i is smooth and very nice--a distinct
improvement for videos that aren't 640x480 in resolution.

Obviously, the 640x480 videos played about as well as they
possibly could at 640x480 resolutions. Even so, playback
to 1280x960i looks better because the interlacing eliminates
visible scanlines, making it look "fuller".

I haven't purchased Zoom Player Professional yet to play
DVDs, because I'm still hoping to get PowerDVD or some other
DVD player working by fiddling around. A few nights of
experimenting is worth saving $20, IMO, especially since
I'm having fun and learning stuff while I'm at it.

Either way, my next priority is actually to get .ogm files
to play, and get all of the DivX files to play correctly.
Currently I use mplayer to play these files--it uses its
own internal codecs and ignores Windows codecs. With hardware
acceleration turned on, it still suffers from the vertical
stretching even with DX9. It's not surprising that it
wouldn't take advantage of DX9 since it's a linux port.
Messing with codecs should hopefully get Zoom Player up to
speed with these files it currently can't play.

Again, I thank you all for the help! Your suggestions have
been invaluble.

Isaac Kuo

 

[Isaac Kuo]

On 8 Dec 2003 08:25:14 -0800, (e-mail address removed) (Isaac Kuo) wrote:

How are you connecting them?

A breakout cable from 15 pin VGA to RGBHV (5 RCA connectors).
My Mitsubishi set supports RGB and RGBHV input, so I don't
need a transcoder. It looks great!

Isaac Kuo

 

[Klaus]

Where did you get it?

chrisv <[email protected]> wrote in message


A breakout cable from 15 pin VGA to RGBHV (5 RCA connectors).
My Mitsubishi set supports RGB and RGBHV input, so I don't
need a transcoder. It looks great!

Isaac Kuo

 

[mcheu]

The short version:

Does anyone know a DVD player program much faster than PowerDVD?
I'm suffering choppy 4-8fps playback with PowerDVD.

Thanks!

Isaac Kuo

Try these:

1. Enable DMA in both the BIOS and the OS for your DVD drive. Power
DVD should have done this by default for the OS part of it if the BIOS
was already properly configured (This is one of the settings that's
properly set from the factory).

2. I was going to suggest you update the motherboard drivers, but as
it's a P3 550, I'm guessing that means you're probably running an
Intel chipset so you're probably already using the right bus mastering
drivers. Of course, if there's a newer one, installing that won't
hurt.

3. Checking off "hardware acceleration" in PowerDVD's configuration
settings will sometimes help if the card does any sort of Discrete
Cosine acceleration -- Which the Radeon does...

4. I know I said to check off "hardware acceleration", but with some
driver versions, this will cause PowerDVD to act weird. Sometimes
giving you choppy performance or just crashing outright. Try it with
and without this option. See if it helps any. Going with a different
video driver might help too.

5. Finally, try playing the DVD with less crap running in the
background. A 550Mhz P3 should be fast enough even running without
hardware acceleration for a constant 30-60fps playback on a DVD movie.
However, you can't expect it to do so if it's juggling other stuff as
well.

 

[Isaac Kuo]

First off, thanks for all the suggestions! I didn't have time
to experiment around last night, so I don't know how well it
will work yet...

On 8 Dec 2003 08:25:14 -0800, (e-mail address removed) (Isaac Kuo) wrote::

Right now, I've gotten Zoomplayer to work with hardware
acceleration turned on, and I now understand why there aren't
any (legitimate) freeware DVD player programs.

Thus, I'm going to try to get PowerDVD working with hardware
acceleration rather than try to find a faster DVD player program.

1. Enable DMA in both the BIOS and the OS for your DVD drive. Power
DVD should have done this by default for the OS part of it if the BIOS
was already properly configured (This is one of the settings that's
properly set from the factory).

Yes, as far as I can tell DMA is working--at least when
hardware acceleration is turned on.

2. I was going to suggest you update the motherboard drivers, but as
it's a P3 550, I'm guessing that means you're probably running an
Intel chipset so you're probably already using the right bus mastering
drivers. Of course, if there's a newer one, installing that won't
hurt.

I don't think it's a motherboard issue. There's something
funny with the Windows default "filter" for scaling the video
output when the display is interlaced. With Zoomplayer and
DirectX9, the scaling is done correctly--when set to specifically
use DX9 for the final filter. Otherwise, the final output
gets stretched 2x vertically (cropping to the top half of the
original video), just like all of the other media players.

3. Checking off "hardware acceleration" in PowerDVD's configuration
settings will sometimes help if the card does any sort of Discrete
Cosine acceleration -- Which the Radeon does...

Strangely, turning off "hardware acceleration" in PowerDVD's
configuration didn't seem to have any noticeable effect. I'm
guessing it's because this setting only affects the actual
MPEG-2 decoding, and I don't have any MPEG-2 decoding hardware.
Or perhaps it simply means that the actual MPEG-2 decoding side
of things isn't the bottleneck.

Either way, the only thing which had a dramatic effect on the
frame rate was turning down "hardware acceleration" in
Window's advanced display settings. This caused the final display
scaling filter to be done entirely in software--and this reduced
PowerDVD playback frame rates to unacceptable levels. Neither
Windows Media Player nor Zoomplayer work properly--the videos
end up at 100% scale aligned to the bottom left no matter what
the scale the software thinks it's at. Only mplayer had acceptable
performance, scaling properly at all resolutions--but suffering
from noticably choppier playback with a lot of dropped frames.

4. I know I said to check off "hardware acceleration", but with some
driver versions, this will cause PowerDVD to act weird. Sometimes
giving you choppy performance or just crashing outright. Try it with
and without this option. See if it helps any. Going with a different
video driver might help too.

With hardware acceleration turned off, PowerDVD acts quite
normally--just with unacceptably choppy performance.

5. Finally, try playing the DVD with less crap running in the
background. A 550Mhz P3 should be fast enough even running without
hardware acceleration for a constant 30-60fps playback on a DVD movie.
However, you can't expect it to do so if it's juggling other stuff as
well.

I don't have anything running in the background (other than the
basic Windows stuff--which isn't a whole lot with Win98).
This computer is a dedicated home theatre PC.

I guess that it's fast enough that the actual MPEG-2 decoding
is not an issue. However, the software rescaling filter is just
too slow. I think perhaps mplayer intelligently only applies
the filter with each new frame (e.g. 24 times per second), whereas
maybe PowerDVD tries to apply it constantly (e.g. 60 times per
second). Either way, I'm going to concentrate my efforts on
getting hardware acceleration to work--it's now working
wonderfully with Zoom Player at 1280x960i resolution.

Thanks!

Isaac Kuo

 

[Isaac Kuo]

Where did you get it?

A local store ordered it for me from Triangle Cable. It's at

http://www.trianglecable.com/

or something like that. Anyway, a Google search for Triangle
Cable, VGA, and RGBHV should find it easily.

Isaac Kuo