arman68
25th July 2003, 10:11
While building my HTPC I carefully chose a Matrox G400 card for its TV output far superior to any other card. One excellent feature of this card is something called DVDMax, which basically is a hardware overlay with some added benefits (overscan, improved picture quality for movie playback, independant settings from desktop).
The problem I have is for the OSD and controls to be displayed on the TV, they need to be in the overlay. FYI I do not thing this is restricted to the G400 as I remember having the same problem when using the overlay on nVidia.
I have tried most commercial DVD players (WinDVD, PowerDVD, TheatreTek, NVDVD, Zoomplayer) and movie players (Zoomplayer, MPC, BSplayer, M2V, Radlight, and others I forget), and none of the one above could output the OSD in the overlay!
I can understand and accept it for free software, and indeed I have lots of admiration for their writer, but I find it unbelievable that commercial software would omit such an important feature; especially when they are targeted at the HTPC market (eg: TheatreTek, Zoomplayer).
The good news is I have found one excellent (free + commercial=$10) player which can do it: Crystal Player. I highly recommend it to anyone. IMHO there are still a few things to be done on this player, but it already has excellent features and performance.
I also think that the mplayer project should be able to do it from reading the manual pages, unfortunaly I have not been able to test it as an added difficulty for me is that the G400 overlay requires YUY2, and I could not get mplayer to output in anything else than YV12. Anyone knows how to do it?
The problem I have is for the OSD and controls to be displayed on the TV, they need to be in the overlay. FYI I do not thing this is restricted to the G400 as I remember having the same problem when using the overlay on nVidia.
I have tried most commercial DVD players (WinDVD, PowerDVD, TheatreTek, NVDVD, Zoomplayer) and movie players (Zoomplayer, MPC, BSplayer, M2V, Radlight, and others I forget), and none of the one above could output the OSD in the overlay!
I can understand and accept it for free software, and indeed I have lots of admiration for their writer, but I find it unbelievable that commercial software would omit such an important feature; especially when they are targeted at the HTPC market (eg: TheatreTek, Zoomplayer).
The good news is I have found one excellent (free + commercial=$10) player which can do it: Crystal Player. I highly recommend it to anyone. IMHO there are still a few things to be done on this player, but it already has excellent features and performance.
I also think that the mplayer project should be able to do it from reading the manual pages, unfortunaly I have not been able to test it as an added difficulty for me is that the G400 overlay requires YUY2, and I could not get mplayer to output in anything else than YV12. Anyone knows how to do it?