Date:
Thursday , September 14, 2006
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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NVIDIA's PureVideo HD Interview & Experiences

Looking for HD on your PC or HTPC? What video cards, displays, hardware, software? We ask some pointed questions of NVIDIA about making this happen and then tell you about our experiences with HD-DVD and NVIDIA's PureVideHD technology.

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NVIDIA PureVideo HD Experiences

NVIDIA sent over the tools last week that we needed in order to get to the bottom of what it is going on if you want to experience HD DVD at home. We are going to be looking at the video and movie side of this issue rather than using the drives as a storage medium. HD DVD and Blu-ray recordable drives will be much like CD-ROMs and DVDs we have now when it comes to burning our own data to the disks. You will need the burner, the right disks, and a software application for the job. If only video were just as easy, but it is not. Hopefully our experiences below along with the previous interview will answer most of your HD movie and video questions.

The system we used for testing was configured as follows:

  • MSI NX7600GT Diamond Plus Edition with HDMI output

  • ForceWare pre-release driver v.92.91

  • CyberLink PowerDVD HD DVD Edition pre-release

  • TSST TS-L802A HD DVD Drive

  • Intel Pentium D 950 - 1GB Ram - Windows XP SP2

The MSI video card does have an HDMI connector on it, but even more importantly it also has an installed "cryptorom" chip. This chip is what makes the video card HDCP compliant. Now a card that has this chip will have either a DVI or HDMI connector or both. For HDCP to work, the video card crytorom must "handshake" with another cryptorom on your display and this handshake must be done across a digital signal. You will see below what happens when you are using an analog connection.

HTPC & HDTV

Undoubtedly many of you are thinking ahead and looking to utilize a HD movie player in your home theater setup. And in fact, when the NVIDIA box arrived last Saturday morning, this was exactly where I moved it to. We have a previous-generation Pioneer 5050HD 50” plasma screen that we do some testing with. It has an HDMI connection and is HDCP compliant so it seemed it would be the first and best candidate for viewing the collection of HD DVD movies that NVIDIA sent along with the player.

The connection with the system went very easily. I plugged in my HDMI connection and my optic audio connection and I had audio and video, just that simple. That is however where the simplicity stopped. The HD DVD video, while delivering some of the sharpest images I have ever seen on this HDTV, was “chugging” at points. Some movies were worse than others, but you simply could not watch the movie without it being distracting. Checking the CPU utilization showed the system to be running about 35% with no visible spikes.

Talking to NVIDIA about this, we were not able to solve the problem; or rather I was not up to the task of fixing it. NVIDIA explained that the issue was most likely to blame on the plasma screen’s image post-processing. There is no doubt that the Pioneer 5050HD does a lot of image post-processing. Pioneer touts a ton of these bells and whistles in their sales pitch alone as being tools needed to give you an overall better picture quality. NVIDIA suggested that I turn off all of the displays post-processing settings, but the fact is that is much more easily said than done. In fact, I think you would need the technical service manual to do so as not all settings are reachable through the GUI. (If you are an HDTV buff and know more about this, please let me know your thoughts as I will have the HD DVD player here for another day.)

So the important thing that HTPC users need to keep in consideration here is that there might be some hoops to jump through to get the image delivery you expect with HD DVD with your HDTV. I would certainly suggest reading up on your particular display as time moves forward. Sadly it looks like currently HTPC and HD DVD might not be “plug and play” for all home theater buffs. As NVIDIA moves forward with their drivers I would suspect this to change.

CRT & SVGA

Our next stop with our PureVideo HD technology was on the lab testbench. We have several older 19” ViewSonic monitors that will do 2048x1536 resolution at very good refresh rates that we use for testing multi-GPU video card configurations.

Using the MSI 7600GT’s DVI output with a SVGA adapter we attached the system with the HD DVD player and were easily up and running. We had a much different experience with our older SVGA monitor than we did with our plasma TV. The picture quality was again stunning, but this time the delivery was perfect. The entire HD DVD movie experience with the pop up menus and such was seamless and intuitive. If you have ever seen any of the “shot for HD” specials on Discovery Channel HD, a lot of our watched HD DVD movies are pushing superior levels of quality with higher bitrates.

So, we found that our with a SVGA connection to an older CRT, that we had no troubles at all.

LCD & DVI

Moving forward and using a Dell model 2001FP built in January 2005 we ran into some issues that were expected. This LCD display is not HDCP compliant, meaning that it does not have the needed cryptorom on board. Using the DVI connection, getting to the desktop was no issue, but when we went to play a copyright protected HD DVD movie the player would fail giving us a link to a diagnostic trouble shooting program, the CyberLink BD / HD Advisor (this will test your system’s HD DVD and Blu-ray readiness). The reason for failure here is simple and expected. We were using a digital connection (DVI) and a non-compliant digital display. Our HD DVD player and movie require an HDCP connection that was not fulfilled by our non-HDCP compliant display. So if you have a non-HDCP LCD display that only has a DVI-in connection, you can count on never using it to watch HD DVD or Blu-ray copyright protected movies.

So what if your LCD has analog inputs?!

LCD & SVGA / S-Video

The “trick” here is that most of our digital LCD displays do in fact have analog SVGA connectors or even component or S-video connectors. So much like we experienced with our CRT, we can watch HD DVD and Blu-ray copyright protected content over the analog connection since the Image Constraint Token has not yet been placed by the movie companies. (See more on ICT below.)

Testing in analog mode on a couple of older LCD displays left us a bit flat. We could never get our displays to even seen the desktop using an analog connection so we could not test in this mode. After several hours of troubleshooting and conversing with NVIDIA on this, the issue seems to be specific to our test system. NVIDIA is going back and doing testing now and will test this system as well when we send it back.

Talking more with what NVIDIA is seeing on this, they do not think it to be a driver bug. After hearing my results, they set up and tested their own systems. NVIDIA tells me that they have had no issues viewing HD DVD and Blu-ray copyrighted movies on non-HDCP compliant digital displays using an analog connection.