Announcement

**Gurm** · 4 August 2000, 21:13

What it DOESN'T have is iDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transforms - say that 10 times fast!). Play a video on an ATI board sometime and you'll see... (bout all those ATI boards are good for, if y'all ask me)

Anywho...

Anamorphic widescreen simply means that it's designed for a widescreen set - they add more picture information on the vertical axis, but some of the lines are tagged for deletion... so that the DVD player can remove them whilst watching on a square screen.

So basically anamorphic is better because someday you can watch it on a widescreen TV in all its glory (or you can watch it on your PC on a big ol' monitor with less jaggies).

- Gurm

------------------
Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

**xortam** · 4 August 2000, 22:14

Here are some sites that describe anamorphic:

The Ultimate Guide to Anamorphic Widescreen DVD (for Dummies)
How Film Is Transferred to Video

Great visual demo at All About Aspect Ratios

**DataOrb** · 5 August 2000, 10:31

Thank you guys, but what still puzzels me, is that a video card without Motion Compression or iDCT such as the G400, takes so much load of my cpu.
Really, how could it be? my celeron is not a top of the line cpu, only 128kb of L2 cache, and only 85Mhz FSB, granted, it's on a BX Board, but still... only 5-10% Load on my CPU? and never passes 40% even on scenes that are really not compressed?
Of course, I am VERY Thankful for that...

------------------

"Excuse me for butting in, but I'm interrupt-driven..."
__________________________________________________ ____
Worstation Specs:
Asus P3B-F w/Celeron@680mhz
160mb PC100 7ns RAM.
Matrox G400 142/190Mhz.
IBM 75GXP 7200RPM 15Gb.
Seagate U8 4.1gb Hdd,
SBlaster Live! Digital.
17" Mag InnoVision 770Ti TrinitronFR Monitor @1152X864
Logitech MouseMan Wheel USB (on Everglide Giganta SE)
Focus 127keys MM Keyboard.
HP SCSI Cd-Rw 7200Si
AOpen X48 CD ROM.
AOpen 1040Pro Slot DVD
3Com NIc @ Tevel/3Com Cable Modem
Modded case, the "banshee". 6 fans.
3Com Palm IIIx + GoType + AxxPAC

**Sisyfos** · 5 August 2000, 12:06

ehem...isn't it called Motion Compensation?
Not that I know what it does, but I think that's what it's called.

**DataOrb** · 5 August 2000, 12:40

oh well, in any case, GeForce cards has it, But the g400 does not.
as matrox states:

DVDMax
Enables DVD and other video streams to be displayed full-screen out to TV, while leaving a fully accessible desktop on your primary display.

-Hardware subpicture blending and scaling for high-quality DVD playback
-Full resolution and frame rates, with low CPU utilization
-Similar to a hardware DVD solution

[This message has been edited by DataOrb (edited 05 August 2000).]

**lindberg** · 7 August 2000, 22:58

DVD-Max is one feature that I just love about matrox!! How cool isn't that to have your desktop and a fullscreen movie in the TV? But dataorb, does it really matter if the card uses 40% of your processor when your watching a movie?? The G400 is indeed demanding much power, I myself used to run a k6-450 and I could barely watch a movie...Some people are really happy if the computer idles at all!
But who cares, when I've stuffed a DVD into my retractable cupholder I don't need to use my computer, I enjoy the movie.

I'll never swap away my matrox for anything else than matrox and dualhead because if the DVD-Max and the dualhead features

------------------
My system:

Athlon 700 MHz
Majesty Processor cooler (sweet)
192 Mb Ram
Asus K7V mb
Matrox G400 (oc @ 150/200)
wester 10.2Gb and seagate 6.5Gb (removable) hdd
Aureal SQ1500 soundcard
Logitech Force Feedback wheel (pretty cool)
300W atx case
Dual Majesty Exhaust fans (sweet silence... )
100 Mb External ZipDrive

My Homepage

**DataOrb** · 8 August 2000, 11:34

Well, what I said was that I am happy that when playing a DVD, my cpu is usally 85% FREE.

------------------

"Excuse me for butting in, but I'm interrupt-driven..."
__________________________________________________ ____
Worstation Specs:
Asus P3B-F w/Celeron@680mhz
160mb PC100 7ns RAM.
Matrox G400 142/190Mhz.
IBM 75GXP 7200RPM 15Gb.
Seagate U8 4.1gb Hdd,
SBlaster Live! Digital.
17" Mag InnoVision 770Ti TrinitronFR Monitor @1152X864
Logitech MouseMan Wheel USB (on Everglide Giganta SE)
Focus 127keys MM Keyboard.
HP SCSI Cd-Rw 7200Si
AOpen X48 CD ROM.
AOpen 1040Pro Slot DVD
3Com NIc @ Tevel/3Com Cable Modem
Modded case, the "banshee". 6 fans.
3Com Palm IIIx + GoType + AxxPAC

**spoogenet** · 8 August 2000, 12:49

Well, congrats. But for my celery running @500, I usually don't get BELOW 30% utilization or above 60% util.

Haven't ever really gotten as low as 5-15% utilized. Of course what you didn't state was your OS and DVD software. Personally, I run Win2k and run WinDVD (1.3.5 or something like that).

Keep in mind though that you have 180 MHz above me and might be running different software....

b

**DataOrb** · 8 August 2000, 19:25

Well, I run Win98 and Cinemaster as a DVD Player. I set the image quality as high as I can get it to be, and 4.1 Speaker surround down mixing.
what I do like, is that when watching a DVD movie, I can hear my hard drive going to sleep! so I guess the move is playing directly from the ram...
oh, and spoogenet, what is the reason you are using WinDVD instead of Cinemaster?

------------------

"Excuse me for butting in, but I'm interrupt-driven..."
__________________________________________________ ____
Worstation Specs:
Asus P3B-F w/Celeron@680mhz
160mb PC100 7ns RAM.
Matrox G400 142/190Mhz.
IBM 75GXP 7200RPM 15Gb.
Seagate U8 4.1gb Hdd,
SBlaster Live! Digital.
17" Mag InnoVision 770Ti TrinitronFR Monitor @1152X864
Logitech MouseMan Wheel USB (on Everglide Giganta SE)
Focus 127keys MM Keyboard.
HP SCSI Cd-Rw 7200Si
AOpen X48 CD ROM.
AOpen 1040Pro Slot DVD
3Com NIc @ Tevel/3Com Cable Modem
Modded case, the "banshee". 6 fans.
3Com Palm IIIx + GoType + AxxPAC

**Gurm** · 8 August 2000, 21:11

DataOrb:

I'm curious - under Win98, how exactly do you determine your CPU utilization?

If your answer is the windows CPU utilization meter thingy, then I think you might be surprised at how much juice the DVD is really taking up, since that meter is notoriously horrible.

- Gurm

------------------
Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

**Sisyfos** · 8 August 2000, 22:52

TaskInfo does a good job.

**DataOrb** · 9 August 2000, 03:31

Exectly what I use... a very handy piece of software...

------------------

"Excuse me for butting in, but I'm interrupt-driven..."
__________________________________________________ ____
Worstation Specs:
Asus P3B-F w/Celeron@680mhz
160mb PC100 7ns RAM.
Matrox G400 142/190Mhz.
IBM 75GXP 7200RPM 15Gb.
Seagate U8 4.1gb Hdd,
SBlaster Live! Digital.
17" Mag InnoVision 770Ti TrinitronFR Monitor @1152X864
Logitech MouseMan Wheel USB (on Everglide Giganta SE)
Focus 127keys MM Keyboard.
HP SCSI Cd-Rw 7200Si
AOpen X48 CD ROM.
AOpen 1040Pro Slot DVD
3Com NIc @ Tevel/3Com Cable Modem
Modded case, the "banshee". 6 fans.
3Com Palm IIIx + GoType + AxxPAC

**Gurm** · 9 August 2000, 06:02

Ah, I'll have to check out TaskInfo.

I was simply refuting his 15% CPU utilization claim - someone has to after all. 40% would be a closer number, no matter which OS you're running (well, SMP doesn't count).

- Gurm

------------------
Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

**spoogenet** · 9 August 2000, 06:50

DataOrb: I'm using WinDVD 'cuz I've got it!

Is Cinemaster the one that ships with the G400? That one doesn't work in Win2k, and I haven't heard of any upgrades yet that make it work in Win2k.

I've heard that PowerDVD is supposed to be good for Win2k, although I haven't tried it.

b

Announcement

Playing DVD's, on which Resolution? oh, and what is "Anamorphic Widescreen"?

Playing DVD's, on which Resolution? oh, and what is "Anamorphic Widescreen"?

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