Surround Video?

[frankymail]

Hi,
I was wondering if there will be a multimedia player (maybe based on Windows Media Player) that will allow us to listen to movies (DVD and DivX) spanning the 3 screens? would be very nice... I'd like Matrox to also include in the package UT2003, Unreal 2, Doom 3, DN4ever and Adobe Premier

[gs2k1]

then you will have a 3:1 format..... tha't not very normal you know

[Wombat]

The rumors here in TCB seem to indicate that only 2 monitors will be able to support overlay.

[piaxVirus]

I would not want any software included if it's going to increase the price. A lot of times it is either demoware, crippleware, not patchable, or not supported. If they included something I like and really use. I would end having to go out and buying the full version.

[Indiana]

Originally posted by Wombat
The rumors here in TCB seem to indicate that only 2 monitors will be able to support overlay.

What do you mean "only two monitors support overlay"??
This is one of the features that I like best about the Parhelia: finally a card that supports more than one hardware Overlay at once (ALL competitors from ATI/NVidia only have one Overlay which can be a major pain in the *ss when using two monitors).
They have done quite some things on my 2D/video wishlist. I really like those 10Bit RAMDAC for TV as well and the hardware accelerated font smoothing. Hope they have the rest of 2D operations sped up as well, this is a major reason for me to buy the Parhelia. 3D performance that is supposed to be crushing the competition is nice as well, though

And no, I don't care if certain authors for THG that are webmasters of NVidia pages will do some "unbiased" comparision at a resolution of 320x240@2Bits with Quake1 to show that the GF4 is faster

What I care about is the performance at 1600x1200@32 with full anisotropic filtering. Personally I consider anisotropic filtering more important than Antialiasing, especially if it is as bad/blurry as the NVidia methods.
ATIs AA is fine quality-wise, but the speed penalty is just too high to be usable. Matrox' solution sounds like the real deal and I am sure the others (i.e. ATI + NVidia) will have to develop similar techniques which will prevent compatibility issues.

[Wombat]

Indiana, I think that it's a good feature. I was just saying in response to franky's 3-monitor movie player, that Parhelia probably couldn't do that. I think you'd need all heads to support overlay to do things like DVD playing. I might be wrong.

[Indiana]

Yes, you're right. Ideally (sp?) it should have overlay support on all three monitors to play back video material on all three at once. However it is possible without overlays and still in decent speed. PowerDVD4/XP e.g. somehow "notices" that my Radeon8500 can only support one Overlay but still has two monitors connected and automatically falls back to using RGB for the video. But it's still not choppy nor really blocky, its just a notch down quality-wise from the overlay display.
MoreTV (a really great TV application for BT848/878 cards) is even a bit crisper when using RGB instead of Overlay (you can choose this in MoreTVs preferences) - of course you loose the gamma-setting possibilities and it takes more CPU-time.

Still, as said, even those two independent HW overlays are a step up from the competition. Hope they've also done something to the quality of the overlays up- / downscaling algorithms.

[Marshmallowman]

looking at the parhelia pics, it seems to have to chrontel chips (2x TV out).

could that be an indicator that you can span video(tv) of two screens?