Are there any software DVD players that works with ATI's hardware acceleration?

[catback]

Hi,

Does any of the numerous software DVD players currently available specifically takes advantage of the hardware assisted DVD playback offered in ATI cards?

Thanks.

[nikthebak]

Radeon-based ATI cards offer hardware iDCT and motion compensation.

From http://www.ati.com Radeon specifications:


* Integrated iDCT and motion compensation allows for DVD decoding with minimum CPU usage


Any software DVD player which supports these hardware interfaces should be able to take full advantage of Radeon chips. These include at least ATI DVD Player (duh :)) and WinDVD beginning from version 2.50 or so.

These are from WinDVD support pages at http://www.intervideo.com:


HWMC Compatibility List

ATI Mobility Radeon
ATI Radeon
ATI Radeon LE
ATI Radeon VE

IDCT Compatibility List

ATI Radeon
ATI Radeon LE
ATI Radeon VE


My personal experiences with my Radeon 7200 are that bundled ATI DVD Player has the best performance, followed by WinDVD 3. For some unexplainead reason, playback with PowerDVD 4 is very unstable and jerky. This may or may not be because the lack of supported hardware iDCT.

AFAIK other than these software DVD players don't support both HWMC and iDCT thus not fully taking advantage of the Radeon chip.

[DJ Bobo]

I have PowerDVD XP 4.00.1392 Standard Version, and it supports ATi Hardware Acceleration fully: IDCT+MC (I have an ATi RAGE128)
Super Smooth Playback & CPU utilisation under 20% (PIII@667MHz)

The proof that it works is that, if I disable Hardware Acceleration, I get over 80% CPU utilisation.

Have a look at all cards that are supported from PowerDVD XP:
http://www.gocyberlink.com/english/products/powerdvd/hardware_comp_list.jsp

[catback]

Does the hardware acceleration of the ATI card improve the actual video quality during playback or does it only affect the speed and ease of playback?

[DJ Bobo]

@ catback
Main improvement is huge speed improvement.
May be there is video quality improvement, but I havn't noticed anything (I havn't really compared)