Upgrade to support HDTV, HDDVD & Blu-Ray (2 Viewers)

[Geon106]

I personally prefer to have a seperate soundcard to take the strain of audio. I love my soundcard as it has digital/optical outputs and what not and is gold plated.

But do you prefer the audiophile mumbo jumbo even if it gets you worse A/V quality?

Using the PC hardware model, there is no way (AFAIK) to synchronise the audio and video card clocks. Whats worse, the cards are pulling data from system at their pace. As all man-made clocks drift, the a/v graph has three options:

1. Do nothing, let each media card receive data at its pace, and observe lip-sync issues into the movie.

2. Drop/replicate video frames whenever audio sync drifts far enough from video sync (this is what WMP does I believe)

3. Resample audio so that the video clock is essentially master, and audio is massaged to slave to that. This will distort audio, especially if you are working on DD streams.

-k

Using PureVideo i have it set to drop video frame rates to match audio outputs as the decoder manages audio/video(obviously from different hardware if you get what i mean). i don't notice any low frame rates and the audio is in sync with the video.

However, my Media Centre which has onboard audio is fine unless i go onto 5.1, in which case there is a bad echo as my front speakers(the TV speakers) get the audio before as it doesn't go through the subwoofer of my home cinema system. The only way i can correct this is to get seperate front speakers or find a audio jack to speaker cable adapter/connection. but thats got nothing to do with what we're discussing lol.

 

[BlueMax1916]

I think dman_lfc's idea is about this technology here:

http://www.micronas.com/pressroom/press_releases/articles/149309/index.html?newslang=1


Cheers

Blue Max

 

[knutinh]

Using PureVideo i have it set to drop video frame rates to match audio outputs as the decoder manages audio/video(obviously from different hardware if you get what i mean). i don't notice any low frame rates and the audio is in sync with the video.

I am not talking about "low framerates", but occasionally dropped frames.

If the video is "NTSC" (ie any tv/video made in the US or Japan) 59.90 fps, you will typically get drifting with the PCs 60 fps system. This means that once in a while, a frame is skipped to keep A/V sync.

A better method would be "speeding up" video and audio by 60/59.9 (practically nothing).

-k

 

[Geon106]

Using PureVideo i have it set to drop video frame rates to match audio outputs as the decoder manages audio/video(obviously from different hardware if you get what i mean). i don't notice any low frame rates and the audio is in sync with the video.

I am not talking about "low framerates", but occasionally dropped frames.

If the video is "NTSC" (ie any tv/video made in the US or Japan) 59.90 fps, you will typically get drifting with the PCs 60 fps system. This means that once in a while, a frame is skipped to keep A/V sync.

A better method would be "speeding up" video and audio by 60/59.9 (practically nothing).

-k

lol oh fair enough

 

[kkendall]

CPU (P E6750), Motherboard (Asus P5K), Memory (2x1GB)

 

[spenca]

Using PureVideo i have it set to drop video frame rates to match audio outputs as the decoder manages audio/video(obviously from different hardware if you get what i mean). i don't notice any low frame rates and the audio is in sync with the video.

I am not talking about "low framerates", but occasionally dropped frames.

If the video is "NTSC" (ie any tv/video made in the US or Japan) 59.90 fps, you will typically get drifting with the PCs 60 fps system. This means that once in a while, a frame is skipped to keep A/V sync.

A better method would be "speeding up" video and audio by 60/59.9 (practically nothing).

-k

... you are not able to speed-up digital TV streams, as they come over satellite or cable! you have drops when you try it!

 

[NoMercy]

Hi,

beside the discussion about h/w ("specialized" h/w vs. graphics card) and mobo/cpu there will be an other reason for me to upgrade hardware: HDMI 1.3a.

My hole systems (full HD) is now based on HDMI 1.3a with the ability to use even the new audio formats like DTS-HD and Dolby True HD, except my media center. I really do not need the decoding option at media center, because my receiver will do this for me.

The first piece of hardware, no matter if graphics card, mobo/cpu etc. that will support HDMI 1.3a (video + sound) will be my "upgrade path".

Greetz

 

[RogueSquadron]

Upgrade done

Hello,

I upgraded already beginning of this year to a dual core CPU and new graphics card. Now I am enjoying HDTV movies in 1080i and 720p.

Regards

Rogue

 

[knutinh]

... you are not able to speed-up digital TV streams, as they come over satellite or cable! you have drops when you try it!

Of course, I was talking about physical formats like DVD and hard-drives.

Still, you can have lipsync/framedrop/audio resample issues with streamed media, and having hardware-referenced clocks makes it a lot easier to cope with.

-k

AnandTech: HD Video Decode Quality and Performance Summer '07

I think that anandtech is being unclear as to what card supports what, so I have tried to "decode" their text

Type acceleration       | Bitstream  | Inverse   | Motion       | Deblocking |
                        | processing | transform | compensation |            |
ATI/AMD 2400/2600: h264 |    yes     |    yes    |    yes       |     yes    |
                   VC1  |    yes     |    yes    |    yes       |     yes    |
                   MPEG2|    yes     |    yes    |    yes       |     yes    |
ATI/AMD 2900:      h264 |     x      |    yes    |    yes       |     yes    |
                   VC1  |     x      |    yes    |    yes       |     yes    |
                   MPEG2|     x      |    yes    |    yes       |     yes    |
Nvidia 8400/8600:  h264 |    yes     |    yes    |    yes       |     yes    |
                   VC1  |     x      |    yes    |    yes       |     yes    |
                   MPEG2|     x      |    yes    |    yes       |     yes    |
Nvidia 8800/7-ser: h264 |     x      |     x     |    yes       |     yes    |
                   VC1  |     x      |     x     |    yes       |     yes    |
                   MPEG2|     x      |     ?     |    yes       |     yes    |

So the ATI mid-range GPUs is your only option for full CPU-offloading of all HD-DVD/BR video codecs. The Nvidia cards will give full offload only for h264 (thats the heaviest codec anyways

Both ATI and Nvidia gives less offloading in their high-end GPUs

If you have got a "slow" cpu, you might want to factor this in. If you have a fast cpu, then GPU offloading of the MPEG2 standard may not be that important.

HD HQV Image Quality Analysis

Silicon Optix HD HQV Scores 
                        |Noise     |Video    |Jaggies |Film     |Stadium |Total 
                        |Reduction |Res Loss |        |Res Loss |        |
AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT   |15        | 20      |  20    | 25      | 10     | 90 
AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT   |15        | 20      |  20    | 25      | 10     | 90 
AMD Radeon HD 2600 Pro  |15        | 20      |  20    | 25      | 10     | 90 
AMD Radeon HD 2400 XT   | 0        | 20      |   0    | 25      | 10     | 55 
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX |25        | 20      |  20    | 25      | 10     | 100 
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS |25        | 20      |  20    | 25      | 10     | 100 
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT  |25        | 20      |  20    | 25      | 10     | 100

Transporter 2 Trailer (High Bitrate H.264) Performance

"...This ~2 minute trailer is encoded with an average bitrate of 40 Mbps. The bitrate actually peaks at nearly 54 Mbps by our observation. This pushes up to the limit of H.264 bitrates allowed on Blu-ray movies, and serves as an excellent test for a decoder's ability to handle the full range of H.264 encoded content we could see on Blu-ray discs.
"

Obviously, a pentium 4 560 gains a lot from using one of the midrange cards compared to the high-end GPUs for h264

Serenity (VC-1) Performance

When we switch to VC1 (still pentium 4), it is obvious that the ATI/AMD 2400/2600 with complete VC1 decode offloads more cpu than the Nvidia 8400/8600 with only partial decoding..

I am surprised that Nvidia 8600 and 8800 has about equal performance for VC1, since the first has IDCT, the latter dont

AnandTech: HD Video Decode Quality and Performance Summer '07
AnandTech: AMD's UVD Debacle
AnandTech: NVIDIA GeForce 8600: Full H.264 Decode Acceleration

http://www.nvidia.com/docs/CP/11036/PureVideo_Product_Comparison.pdf
ATI Radeon™ HD 2900 Series - GPU Specifications
ATI Radeon™ HD 2600 Series - GPU Specifications

 

[mce2005]

I have ABIT IL-90MV with HDMI and would like use it for HDTV. The board itself supports 1080p, but the oboard graphics card has to less power for it.

It would be great to have a PCI/PCIe 1x card to make all decoding work and to watch HTDV on it!

I use T7200 C2D and my whole PC consumes 35 watt in idle. I do not want to buy a 200watt PC for HDTV Tv. It is smarter to have a small decoder card with very low power consumtion rather as buying a ATI HD2600 monster! But it should help decoding H.264 and VC-1 @1080p.

So just do it and give as this card! ;-) I assume It will be a card with smth like the Universal Video Decoding (UVD) chip from ATI?

When can we expect this?