Intervideo WinDVD5 , Better Software MPEG2 than Hardware Playback

[satirewolf]

I've come upon an odd peculiarity about the new Intervideo WinDVD5 that I purchased just recently for playing DVD's on my HTPC, as well as for snapstream. I figured that if the intervideo codec included with my hauppauge pvr-250 was as good as it was, the newer one should be even better.

I never could get nvDVD to output properly on my ATI Radeon 9600 or my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro on my workstation. No matter what combination of settings I used, the mpeg2 playback from my recordings (10mbps) was always noisy, and some times had motion artifacts. This is with Catalyst 4.4 drivers. The intervideo, and cyberlink playback was MUCH smoother, the video just looked less pixelated.

And this is with out of the box settings!

So I thought, what the heck, lets try WinDVD5. Surprise, surprise, the video output is even better. Dvd's play in software acceleration mode with 20 percent cpu utilization. If I force WinDVD5 to use hardware motion compensation and dxva, my cpu useage jumps to 35 percent!

Simply setting the registry settings:
dxva 1
hwmc 1

Causes the cpu utilization to jump up.

Also, on widescreen films, the black borders become somewhat grayish with hwmc and dxva set to 1.

The video quality and cpu utilization is better in software mode .

I think everyone should try out the new codec's intervideo has written, because they really did something right this time.

[Bilar Crais]

Per your suggestion, I've installed Intervideo's latest WinDVD, and you are correct; it's the best for LiveTV that I've tried yet.

I have been trying hardware supported codecs, such as NvDVD and CinePlayer 1.5, but de-interlace was terrible with both.

WinDVD filters have seamless de-interlace, and CPU usage is second lowest only to CinePlayer, which had poor playback quality
anyway.