PowerDVD

[BankZ]

I am running BTVLink on my laptop which has a ATI 9700 Mobil video card. I have been using the Nvidia DVD coder. I also have PowerDVD installed on the laptop. I want to compare to the two decoders to see which gives me the best performance. Are there any registry tweaks for PowerDVD6 that I should do before I compare the two?

[pdaughe]

I've used both and both are great decoders. If by "performance" you mean CPU requirements, that's going depend largely on the settings. If you turn on CLEV2 in PowerDVD, it indeed uses 20 to 30 percent more CPU (based on a Intel 2.8GHZ), but the picture quality is excellent.

The Nvidia DVD decoder (now called the PureVideo decoder), provides hardware-assisted decoding when coupled with a graphics card with PureVideo technology. I use the PureVideo decoder with a GeForce 6200 AGP and the CPU utilization (again, 2.8GHZ) is less than five percent (5%) during playback. In my case, I have a dedicated HTPC so I really don't care what the CPU utilization is (it's there to be used) as long as everthing functions fine.