G400 MAX DVDMAX and HDTV

[mmp121]

Hi all!

I just made a new purchase. I purchased an ATI HDTV Wonder card. I had a few minor issues getting the card installed and working. Its installed in TITAN (I'll update my signature w/HDTV Wonder card later). Captures and watching of HDTV OTA broadcasts work splendedly now.

I tried playing back some of the captured files (converted to MPG w/AC3 audio) on MINI which is connected to my regular old TV via my venerable G400MAX w/DVDMAX enabled and SVIDEO cable. The problem I am having is that when I play the video, 720P, DVDMAX does not "start" like its supposed to. I assume that DVDMAX was never designed to work with HD video?

I know that I can not view native HD video on my SD TV. But will/does/can the G400MAX re-scale the video on the fly to SDTV resolution via DVDMAX ? Or am I going to have to transcode the video to DVD resolution before DVDMAX will do its thing on the video stream?

Any and all help will be appreciated.

[magician]

Well... here's how it works...

G400's DVDMAX feature is limited by amount and speed of integrated graphic memory (those 32MB of SGRAM).

One thing is for sure, you can't have DVDMAX if your desktop (primary screen) resolution is "to high" (more then 1024x768@85Hz), because it will eat up to much bandwidth and leave less then necessary for operation of DVDMAX. I heard that some people managed to extend that limit to 1280x960@75Hz and more, by overclocking the card, but considering the fact that you have G400MAX I think you already have all the power of that architecture out of box.

Regarding HD video reproduction, I never tryed that on my G400DH but I suppose that it will work only in blittering mode, because overlay (which is needed for DVDMAX) is limited by amount and bandwidth of graphic memory, as I explained above.

The only reasonable solution that I can come up with is that you could try clonning your Desktop to TV and then play video in full screen. Of course it will be done by blittering (software rendering), so you should turn of DVDMAX.

Be aware that G400 will produce worse picture quality in that scenario, even if you are using HD video, because of G400's poorly implemented scaling algorithm. Taking risk to explaining obvious, in clone mode Maven chip will simply take picture from primary monitor (whole desktop), scale it to appropriate resolution and generate PAL or NTSC signal.

I hope this is of some help.

[greinedo]

An alternative is perhaps FFDShow and it's feature of resizing on the fly.

When installed and configured for Raw Video, FFDShow might be able to intercept the video stream and resize softwarewise to PAL or NTSC, before sending it in Overlay and with DVDMax to the G400 TV-out.

I'm using quite the same trick with my P750 for watching HD video on my TV. The amount of data of the original stream (720p) is just to much for the P750 (jercky playback). When downscaling to PAL before, with FFDShow, it's perfect.

The resize algorithm I prefer with FFDShow is Lanczos n°4.