Is Zoran SoftDVD fixed for my Marvel G200 yet?

[NotEd]

I was away this past week and was mildly suprised to finally see an update to the Powerdesk and VideoTools for my Marvel G200. I am going to download them tomorrow at work and install them, along with the new Liveware 3 drivers from Creative Labs, but I have this little question. Has anyone tried Zoran SoftDVD with these new drivers yet? I've been waiting several months since the last upgrade when the Zoran software was broken, and I really do not want to be disappointed again. I was just on the edge of giving up on Matrox when their Tech Support told me in an email that they were not aware of the problem, even tho' it appeared in the MURC news. I might still give up, depending on the results I get tomorrow. I'd love to hear from anybody who has tried this yet. Otherwise wish me luck.
NotEd

[Bixler]

If you are running the DVD Hardware Card, and have a similar setup to mine, a POSSIBLE workaround is here:http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum5/HTML/005515.html

No other news to report--except that they SAY that they are close to a pure software patch on the Region code issues, and other bugs. No one is talking about a real fix for the DVD Hardware card issues yet. Matrox Tech has advised me to get a refund, but as it stands now with me, I'm playin movies--just with a stripped down system.

[NotEd]

Actually I was just running the decoder software only, like it came with the card. I was looking into the possibility of adding the hardware decoder, but I didn't see the need to. With my Celeron 300a at 450 I was getting perfectly acceptable playback. Then when the Powerdesk 5.x drivers killed the software only and hardware I decided to hold off. I'm glad I did, all things being equal. I find it so frustrating that this card has never worked 100% the way Matrox has promised. As much as I appreciate the fact that I could downgrade the drivers or create a dual boot with the older 4.33m drivers, I am not going to go through all that trouble just to get every promised feature of this card working. I'm sorry if I sound like I'm complaining (although I am) or venting (ditto), but is it really too much to ask to have OpenGL, Direct3D, Video Capture and DVD playback all working at once? This card has already cost me money when I had to pick up a Voodoo 2 card to finish a few games that did not work properly with the Direct3D drivers. Then I lost video capture and tuning when Powerdesk 5.13 was released, without video tools. Then Powerdesk 5.15 and the new Video Tools are released....in beta?!? I'd settle for it, except that OpenGL is a joke (corruption throughout the image) and SoftDVD stops working. What worse is that when I write to Matrox support I am told that I should go back to Powerdesk 4.33 and use the OpenGL Beta ICD, even though Direct3D is problematic and their own documentation says to not use the Beta ICD with the 4.33 drivers! What is worse is that if I didn't read the MURC news I never would have known that the Zoran SoftDVD was the problem, as there still is nothing listed about it in the support section of the Matrox website.
Arghhhhh.
If I had the money I'd give up and start again from scratch.
Thank you for reading my rant. And thanks for the suggestion, Bixler.

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If you had a infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters one of them would eventually become head of Tech Support.

Matrox Marvel G200 PD5.25, Bios 2.6
Abit BH-6 v1.1
Celeron 300a at 450 2.0v
128 MB PC-100 Dimm
3DFX Voodoo 2 PCI
Sound Blaster Live Value w/ Liveware 3.0
Maxtor 5.7 GB UDMA/33 HD
Hitachi GD-2500 3rd Gen DVD-ROM
Generic LS-120 drive, Teac 3.5" Floppy