BSA Starfire, could you also test PowerDVD trial versions 3 and 4? Note that version 1.5 requires 3DNow!, which the MII does not support. Version 2 is not on oldversion, and version 5 had some sound skipping in it. For these reasons, I think version 3 or 4 might work for you as they did for me. Version 3 for NT4 because Version 4 did not work in NT4. Version 4 and version 3, in W2K, had the same CPU usage.
http://www.oldversion.com/windows/powerdvd/

swaaye wrote:

This is the exact K-Lite Codec Pack that I used on 98SE to do some DVD tests on a K6-3 and Pentium 3. http://filehippo.com/down […]
Show full quote

This is the exact K-Lite Codec Pack that I used on 98SE to do some DVD tests on a K6-3 and Pentium 3.
http://filehippo.com/download_klite_codec_pack/3194/
I also used a version of Cinemaster 99 found here:
http://www.cdrinfo.pl/download/1187044644

That version of Cinemaster would hang my MII system in Win98SE.

That K-lite Codec Pack requires DX 9.0c to be installed. Would any DX9 titles run on an MII-433 with a Voodoo3? I am thinking not, so I don't particularly want to up my DX version just to test this codec pack. Does anyone know where to download just an mpeg-2 dvd codec that is not bundled?

Cinemaster wouldn't work for me either, gave a message stating another program was stopping DVD playback then quit. The ATI players would not work without DirectX 8.1 and readme file stated only Radeon and Rage128 support not Rage Pro. PowerDVD ver 3 is working fine, no stuttering and sound is perfect CPU usage is 100%, but it works great. Now I need to track down a full version from somewhere, nothing on ebay I can find 🙁

I just updated my ATi Rage PRO TURBO drivers with the latest set from AMD for Windows ME. http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/archive/legacy-98me Was using the embedded drivers in ME before this. The Cinemaster player is now working great, even faster and smoother than Power DVD ver 3. Easily as good as a standard under the telly DVD player now. Very happy to have it working well 😀 CPU is also far lower now, peaking at 75%, seems the RAGE PRO is doing most of the work now rather than the 6X86.

Thanks again all!

Chris

OK, with more extensive use the Cinemaster player is less than perfect, it's very picky about what discs it will even recognise and locks up after about 20 mins and needs rewinding then playing on those it does. This is not the solution i was hoping for 😉 I can't vouch for the stability of PowerDVD 3 as the trial only allows a short play before cutting audio the video.
Back to the drawing board!

Also both the Ati DVD players need a serial and original driver/DVD player CD to install so no go there either.

You can dig up PowerDVD 2.55 or WinDVD as well. Both have quality problems though.

To be honest I thought the K-Lite pack with MPC and included PowerDVD 7 decoder was the best result! Make sure MPC is set for Overlay output.

Look at this:
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showpost.php?p=80297&postcount=8

Ok, I did a lot of testing with different VGA cards, and different SoftDVD programs...here's what I found […]
Show full quote

Ok, I did a lot of testing with different VGA cards, and different SoftDVD programs...here's what I found

ATI-Rage128Pro support (iDCT + HWMC + subpic-alpha)

1) Cinemaster 1999 or later (including ATI DVD 3.1 or later)
(VideoDecoder.PerformanceClass = 0x04)
http://www.ravisent.com

2) WinDVD 2.2 or later
**does not de-bob interlaced video correctly, displays
half-frame only
http://www.intervideoinc.com

3) MGI SoftDVD MAX 4.0
**does not de-bob interlaced video correctly, displays
half-frame only
http://www.mgisoft.com

4) Mediamatics DVD Express 5.0.94
(*OEM only, IBM Thinkpad)
(must manually enable 'MCAM')

All above players, except MGI, also support RageXL/Mobility iDCT. I just got a RadeonLE, so I'll see which of these players support RadeonLE in iDCT mode. Obviously, Cinemaster2000 supports Radeon. Medimatics and WinDVD probably also support Radeon.

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

The following players support ATI-Rage128Pro in 'MC12' mode (HWMC only...pseudo-compatible with ATI Rage Pro.)

1) Cinemaster 1999 or later (couldn't test earlier version)
Through registry hacking, user can force 'MC12'
(VideoDecoder.PerformanceClass = 0x03)
http://www.ravisent.com

2) WinDVD 2.2 or later (couldn't test earlier version)
***not directly...through 'bug' on my system
***WinDVD will automatically attempt to 'MCAM' (Rage128)

3) Mediamatics DVD Express 5.0.94 (couldn't test earlier)
(must manually enable 'MC12')

4) PowerDVD 3.00 (1016)
**does not de-bob interlaced video correctly, displays
half-frame only
...buggy MC12 support, motion-comp artifacts

5) **PowerDVD 2.55 0113 or 0202
**does not de-bob interlaced video correctly, displays
half-frame only
...buggy MC12 support, hangs on most interlaced videos
Build 0620 does not support Rage128-Pro.

This leads me to believe, PowerDVD 'reverse engineered' ATI's HWMC interface.

...

I'm doing a 'low-end PC-DVD roundup.' As soon as I'm done with testing, I'll post some results...

I tested these cards :

(1) S3 Savage3D 8MB AGP SGRAM (64-bit mem)
(2) S3 Savage4 16MB AGP SDRAM (64-bit mem)
(3) SiS 305 16MB AGP SDRAM (32-bit mem interface, yuck)
(4) ATI Rage Pro 8MB AGP SDRAM (64-bit mem)
(5) ATI Rage Pro Turbo 8MB AGP SGRAM (64-bit mem)
(6) ATI RageXL 8MB AGP SDRAM (64-bit mem)
(7) ATI Rage128 Pro 8MB AGP SDRAM (64-bit mem)
(8) Trident 'Blade3D' 9880 8MB AGP SDRAM (64-bit mem)
(9) NVidia Geforce2/MX 32MB AGP SDRAM (128-bit SDR mem)
(10) ATI Radeon LE 32MB DDR SDRAM (128-bit DDR)

Each card with these programs :

(1) PowerDVD 2.55
(2) PowerDVD 3.0
(3) Cinemaster2000 Build 6605 (ElsaDVD)
(4) WinDVD 2.3 trial
(5) MGI SoftDVD Max 4.0.28

As you can see, that's 50 combinations, and it's taking a while...

So far, of the tested cards, Rage128-Pro has most performace-acceleration. S3 Savage3D/4 and Rage128/Pro are neck to neck in image-quality. (Savage has better downscaling below shrink factor of 0.5. Rage128 has better upscaling above zoom factor of 1.0.)

Strangely enough, Geforce2/MX has worst performance-acceleration, especially with PowerDVD.

Trident Blade3D has worst image quality (no subpic-alpha, and mediocre overlay-zoom quality.)

Rage-Pro and RageXL's overlay controller require minimum X-stretch factor of 2.0X (or drops adjacent pixels.) Probably due to RAMDAC and/or memory bandwidth constraint.

RageXL, despite iDCT support, is marginally faster than the other HWMC cards.

S3 Savage3D and NVidia Geforce2/MX both 'cheat' when constructing Directdraw overlays -- this means both devices allocate excessive video-memory. The Savage3D allocates exactly 2.0X 'expected amount' (16bpp 720x480 YUV overlay = 675KB. Savage3D allocates 1350KB.) Geforce2/MX allocates between 2-3X 'expected amount.'

SiS DVD-overlay performs hardware subpicture-alpha blending through overlay, but the subpicture overlay is filtered poorly (zoom/shrink looks worse than background DVD-video.)

S3 Savage3D/4, NVidia Geforce2/MX *probably* do NOT have hardware overlay blending. Instead, the drivers use BITBLT engine to combine subpicture data with decoded video-frame. Savage3D/4 both have 'perfect' overlay scaling (i.e. seamless blending with background, at all zoom/shrink factors.) Nvidia Geforce's subpicture-blending shows evidence of artifical sharpen-filter (edges of subtitle text are brighter than surrounding pixels?!?)

ATI Radeon uses 3D-core to perform BITBLT stretch/shrink. (This is obvious when playing AVI/MPEG at high-resolution, the screen wipes along a diagonal line. The diagonal line divides the upper screen exactly into 1 triangle.) Radeon's stretch-blt quality is *inferior* to Rage128, Savage3D.

Looks like that guy on the rage3d forum was really determined to find the best combination.

PowerDVD -v3 (NT4) and PowerDVD -v4 (W2K/98SE) worked fine for me. I have the retail version of PowerDVD v3 somewhere, but it cannot be located. It came on some driver disc. BSA Starfire, if you locate these for download, let me know where. If you have an extra PCI slot, it might be easiest to obtain a Creative DXR2 card. Even on a 486, you can play DVDs.

MPEG 1/2(DVD) hardware decoder cards

feipoa wrote:

To answer my own question, yes you can play DVD movies on a pci-based 486 using a Creative DXR2. My 486(s) have the UMC 8881/88 […]
Show full quote

To answer my own question, yes you can play DVD movies on a pci-based 486 using a Creative DXR2. My 486(s) have the UMC 8881/8886 chipset. I used a Cyrix 5x86-120 during this test.

I tested the card in Windows 98SE and Windows NT4.0 with a SCSI DVD-ROM and an IDE DVD-ROM. The SCSI DVD-ROM was SCSI2 and the IDE DVD-ROM was in PIO-4 mode using the onboard IDE connector (M919 motherboard).

In Windows 98SE, the resource meter showed about 44% cpu usage when playing a DVD with the IDE drive, whereas 20% with the SCSI drive. In Windows NT4.0, I only tested the SCSI drive and task manager did not show any cpu usage above that of an idle task manager. I had no issues with sound. My default resolution is at 1024x768, however I also tested DVD playback at 1280x1024 which also worked, but was not as clear. At 1280x1024, the VGA pass-thru isn't as crisp even when browsing around Windows, but not so bad that it would be noticed if using a CRT monitor.

From the incredibly low CPU usage, I wonder how slow a 486 CPU DVD playback will work with? I wonder why Creative set the system requirements to a Pentium 100; the pentium instruction set doesn't appear to be used in the Creative DVD Player's software.

At 1024x768, the DVD playback quality is quite good. If I playback at full screen, and sit back about a meter, I don't think I could tell the difference between that and software based playback on a P4+.

Unfortunately, PCI real-estate on a 486 is expensive. I don't think I can give up my 10/100 PCI network card for a DVD-decoder card, nor my PCI graphics and SCSI cards. The 10/100 ISA card just doesn't seem to cut it compared to PCI. Oh well -- it only cost me $7 to answer a question I've been wondering about for years. And you all get the answer for free!

Feipoa are you sure that MPC requires DX9 for more than the Video Mixing Renderer (VMR9)? The best performance output should be Overlay in our case anyway. Hardware overlay is a high performance video output that was popular with old video cards. Hardware scaling and such. VMR is for more modern GPUs.

I can't remember if I had DX9 installed on my test rig at the time.

MPC does not require DX9; K-lite requires DX9. If you don't install DX9, K-lite will not install using its own installer.

I still think that at those times one of the best speed/quality solution with CRT monitor obviously, was the Hollywood+/Dxr3 card. Maybe difficult to set up a perfect compatible solution (os,chipset,crt,..) but I was happy with it.

I have finally gotten around to setting up a Creative DXR-2 hardware decoder card on my other Cyrix 6x86 MII 333(3.5 x 75MHz) system, this one is on a SiS chipset with 1024KB cache, 128mb RAM, Matrox G450 PCI, Soundblaster 32 ISA. CPU usage is pretty much zero, I also wonder why Creative specified a minimum of a Pentium 100?
Works great, watched a ton of boxsets on the old beast over last week, nice to have on as background while I'm playing Xbox or whatever.

BSA Starfire wrote:

I also wonder why Creative specified a minimum of a Pentium 100?

The main reason is to have sufficient data transfer rate from a ATAPI DVD drive at that time. So a P100 is specified because it is socket 7, so it most likely uses a PIIX3 as southbridge supporting Bus Master DMA for transfer.