Jon-missing something w/o MMC7.1

[rudee]

Jon- I read in another post where you also skipped the mmc7.1 install and just installed the ATI 4.1 player. I did the same and was glad to see someone who had done the same. Are we missing anything by doing this? I haven't had any viewing time as of late - whole system is apart and dedicated room is under construction. What about the aspect control unlock patch or dvdgenie- Did you install anything else. I have playback now and it looks really good. Just want to make sure everything is up to par


rudee

[JonMarsh]

Hi Rudee,

For my purposes, I'm not missing anything, because I don't care about CD playback or any of the other media playback stuff in MMC 7.1.

Installed this way, the Video control panel was available without any registry hack.

I did install DVD Genie, and ran it once for configuration setup; unless you're changing regions, don't see that it buys you anything much.

The aspect ratio control is occasionally wrong on DVD menu's, but it's always playing correctly when I go full screen (which is all that matters to me), and since I always use "square pixels" regarding display modes on monitors, that works fine. No need for me to mess around with the other hacks, though I'm no stranger to Regedit.

On a slightly unrelated topic, I've come across a new DVD player that I'm going to evaulate, probably more for Desktop or laptop use- CoolDVDSoft. It's from Korea, of all places. It's pretty robust and stable, handles scaling smoothly on the one system I've tested it on (GeForce Card), and seems to have as good or better playback quality than PowerDVD, no stutters or frame drops. It's only real peculiarity is lack of a full screen mode; it uses a resizable window, that can be dragged to full screen, but still has a thin border. Sort of odd. But it's compact and runs well on relatively modest hardware for a software player. Got to throw some "stress" disks at it, like Matrix, T2 SE, Shakespeare in Love, some recent MGM titles. May not be the panacea for all situations; might be great for some laptops, though.

I'm planning on getting an LE Radeon this weekend and replacing my desktop Geforce. Should be interesting to see how that works- I think it will do a better job driving my NEC flat panel display- my Matrox at work is better than the GeForce two; fine timing issues, I think.

BTW, Red Planet looked and sounded great on the ATI player. So did The Sixth Day.

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[rudee]

well this is good to hear- let us know how the new player works- I keep hearing of Media Player 8 being the ticket. Still waiting on XP? I'm still down, no way to to test DD playback or get any real use outta this card until my room is finished. bummer- but will be well worth the wait and maybe ATI will have all the kinks worked out by then.
Wiring my 2 20 amp isolated ground circuits to the equipment room and another 20 amp to the proj as we speak.
Good luck on the new player

rudee

[JonMarsh]

I think the XP Media player is going to be the cat's meow for a while; I'm looking at this other for portable or "lower end" appliations on WIN98, or 2000, particularly laptops or less "power user" systems. This weekend I'll hopefully have time to do some torture testing.

Work has been a torture test; in order to fix a network problem, which I suspected was a issue with the network port I've been plugged into, IS took my old desktop from 95 to NT4, service pack 4; at every step, it's behavior deterioriated, until they ran diagnostics on the port, and agreed to move me to a different one. Now everything is humming again, but the system is running NT, and I've got to re install EVERYTHING!

Only two days of productivity lost. NT doesn't exactly hum on a 200 MHz PPro with only 64MB of RAM, either!

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....