I had the first several generation of Ati Radeon video cards, and they included MMC/DVD player on the driver CD, which should provide IDCT.

Stretch wrote on 2020-05-09, 15:54:

I had the first several generation of Ati Radeon video cards, and they included MMC/DVD player on the driver CD, which should provide IDCT.

Unfortunately all the cards I bought in the past came without boxes/cd and I read the ATi (I think based on Cinemaster engine) DVD Player need the exact cd with the right card something like that. Surely it'd be the best combination, it'd interesting to compare it to modern GPU decoding quality if anyone can with no post-processing.

I can highly recommend PowerDVD XP/4.0 along with any Radeon video card for older systems. It even allows a weak P2-300 or K6-2 500 to play DVD smoothly. Here were some CPU usage numbers I saw whilst playing DVD on the following systems, all with PDVD 4.0:

K6-2 500MHz, Radeon 7000, 128MB SDRAM, Win2000 SP4: 68 - 98%
P2-300, Radeon 7000, 512MB SDRAM, Win2000 SP4: 47 - 78%
PIII-550 (Katmai), Radeon 7000, 512MB SDRAM, Win2000 SP4: 29 - 40%
PIII-S @ 1628MHz, Radeon 9800 Pro, 2GB DDR-SDRAM, WinXP SP3: 2 - 4%

I prefer Cinemaster 99 for K6-2/3 level hardware. I even had a P3 at 300MHz decoding in software with it. Excellent quality too. It can be found with some searching. This is what the ATI player is based on.

Once you go into somewhat faster hardware like a midrange P3, there is an old version of Klite Codec Pack that works with Win98 and has a PowerDVD MPEG2 decoder that works very well.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2020-05-09, 16:47:

I can highly recommend PowerDVD XP/4.0 along with any Radeon video card for older systems. It even allows a weak P2-300 or K6-2 […]
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I can highly recommend PowerDVD XP/4.0 along with any Radeon video card for older systems. It even allows a weak P2-300 or K6-2 500 to play DVD smoothly. Here were some CPU usage numbers I saw whilst playing DVD on the following systems, all with PDVD 4.0:

K6-2 500MHz, Radeon 7000, 128MB SDRAM, Win2000 SP4: 68 - 98%
P2-300, Radeon 7000, 512MB SDRAM, Win2000 SP4: 47 - 78%
PIII-550 (Katmai), Radeon 7000, 512MB SDRAM, Win2000 SP4: 29 - 40%
PIII-S @ 1628MHz, Radeon 9800 Pro, 2GB DDR-SDRAM, WinXP SP3: 2 - 4%

Thanks. I tried both PowerDVD XP and Windvd 5. Interestingly with Win ME I've seen a P3-500 with the Radeon 9250 using from 2 to 10% of cpu (with IDCT). That's one of the things that lately is interesting me, how good these old fashion acceleration resulted in visual quality compared to both home players and modern GPU VDPAU or whatever acceleration. The REALMagic cards were awesome but had their problems with the external vga cable and general stability that depends on many variables (video card first, cables second, monitor also..), but I forgot at some point how good the early 2000-2003 DVD decoding status was.
Nowdays everyone seems focusing on blue-ray and ultra high resolution stuff but what's the point there where pixel resolution is that high.
I had the feeling that Windvd had better visual quality (?).

swaaye wrote on 2020-05-09, 17:07:

I prefer Cinemaster 99 for K6-2/3 level hardware. I even had a P3 at 300MHz decoding in software with it. Excellent quality too. It can be found with some searching. This is what the ATI player is based on.

Once you go into somewhat faster hardware like a midrange P3, there is an old version of Klite Codec Pack that works with Win98 and has a PowerDVD MPEG2 decoder that works very well.

Yeah I remember also how good ATi players, probably deeply optimized for its hardware, were on a friend Rage 128 card in its days. How did ATi dvd sw worked? Did it need the exact card of the box or just the model?

386SX wrote on 2020-05-09, 18:12:

Yeah I remember also how good ATi players, probably deeply optimized for its hardware, were on a friend Rage 128 card in its days. How did ATi dvd sw worked? Did it need the exact card of the box or just the model?

As I said, the ATI player is an OEM version of Software Cinemaster.
http://www.pennskog.com/cinemaster/software.htm

I dug up some product info. It appears to support all of the important hardware acceleration and CPU SIMD features.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010124062500/ht … tore/cmdvd.html

Rage 128 has acceleration for almost all of the MPEG2 decoding process so you can play DVDs on a very slow system with it.

Back in the day I could only get smooth playback using WinDVD and DVDgenie (what versions I don't recall).
There was a setting in DVDgenie to crank the "quality" of playback way down and then everything was smooth.

I am not sure of the system I had at the time. Maybe a K6-III+ or even an Athlon with whatever the fastest and mostest RAM is my board and OS could handle (likely 4 GB).
I was running win98SE for sure though.

I also started with PowerDVD XP (WinDVD never worked for me, not sure why)..
However, I quickly updated and bought myself a copy of PowerDVD 6 Deluxe (released ca. 'o4 or' 06).
That version served me well into the 2010s and had awesome deinterlacers built-in (could also use the GPU's deinterlacing via DXVA).
If memory serves, that one was the last version to run on Windows 98SE/Me.
Version 7 was intertesting, because it initially supported DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
Later versions switched to a different code base, I assume, and had little in common to the classic releases.
Anyway, I wouldn't use anything below PowerDVD 3, since it lacks advanced CPU support (3D Now ?, SSE2, SSE3 etc.)

Edit: I forgot. PowerDVD 3 to 6 also worked for me with an -ahem- RC0 DVD drive. And from inside of a VM.
This information might be interesting for some of you, I guess. 😀

In WinDVD Trial 4 Platinum there's the check info for all three version of 3DNow!, SSE1, 2 and even HyperThreading I wasn't expecting. The good thing of WinDVD is that it actually says in the info if you're using IDCT acceleration or other. In PowerDVD XP I did see the "ATI hardware decoding: in use" or something like that but imho I always had the feelings the quality of the final image was a bit different but probably just feelings. But PowerDVD felt having faster window management from desktop to full screen or for resize it.