MPEG-4 decoding quality improved by AVIVO and Purevideo?

[silva2]

Hi,

Please move this thread to other section if it doesn't fit here. I'm not sure where to place it, sorry.

I'm planning to build a new PC soon, and watching movies and TV will be the main things to do with it, besides web browsing. From what I know, it seems that a modern PC can equal or surpass the quality of a movie played through the more traditional TV + stand-alone DVD player. After reading a lot about AVIVO and Purevideo, a few articles lead me to think nothing can beat the power of current graphics card from ATI and Nvidia in terms of decoding and improving the quality of the original video.

I'm referring of articles like this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/09/avivo-vs-purevideo/index.html

But... am I correct to assume all video files played are benefited from the noise reduction and other image enhancers these cards can offer?

I'm asking this because besides watching DVD's (which use MPEG2), I've been encoding movies and TV shows using MPEG4 codecs - mainly using divx, but also tried a few with xvid. If for some reason these graphics cards can't do same decoding magic to MPEG4 videos as apparently (?) can do to MPEG-2, does this mean there's no way to improve the decoding quality?


Thanks in advance for any help, and sorry if this is a dumb question. I searched quite a bit for infos regarding this subject, but no luck.

[jggimi]

Welcome to Doom9's Forum.

I'm moving your question thread to our hardware discussion section.

[silva2]

I'm moving your question thread to our hardware discussion section.
Thanks, jggimi.
Sadly, it seems no one so far knows the answer to my doubt. :(

Maybe this is not the right place to ask? I really thought this was something relatively easy to answer in a forum with so many experts in the PC and video field.

[Audionut]

Well for me, purevideo provides improved performance.

And for mpeg2 decoding, particularly with interlaced stuff, provides excellent picture quality.

Haven't really tested with mpeg4.

edit: and you need a fairly new graphics card to do any fancy GPU tricks with mpeg4 stuff.

[Turtleggjp]

Just about any modern video card can accelerate MPEG2 at up to HD resolutions just fine (I've seen a Radeon 9250 do it). As far as MPEG4 ASP (DivX, XviD, etc.) I'm not sure how much acceleration is offered, or is even needed. I have a 1.6 GHz Sempron that can handle my 1920x1080 XviD encodes (barely, but it does). Of course if you want to turn on post processing (deblocking) at that resolution, even my dual core 2.4GHz chokes on that.

The other big focus on acceleration these days is AVC/H.264 video, such as from X264. I have now seen both a GeForce 7600 GT and a Radeon X1600 Pro accelerate such video using Cyberlink's Power DVD 7.2 Ultra. They don't accelerate it very much (nothing like MPEG2) and the GeForce card seemed to have trouble with blockiness with my X264 encode (in-loop de-blocking perhaps), but at least I have seen something.

Matt