Hardware and playback quality

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Bushido Philosopher
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Hardware and playback quality

Post by Bushido Philosopher » Sat Sep 14, 2002 12:08 pm

Does hardware on the computer effect the quality that video is displayed?

By this I mean if you have more recent hardware than someone else, then will the video look more clean and smooth when the same file is played?

(Assume that they have the same processor speed, just different video hardware or whatever you call it. That's the reason I'm asking...I have no idea about the actual hardware in the process.)
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ErMaC
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Post by ErMaC » Sat Sep 14, 2002 3:57 pm

There are a few places where this will matter:

1) software-based post-processing. This is where you go into the DivX Advanced tabs and move that quality slider around. Basically what this does is enable or disable various post-processing options which eat up CPU time. Turning them all off (level 0) shows you approximately what the stream will look like if you decode it through the Video for Windows interface (i.e. in VirtualDub) except for the next point...
2) hardware-based post-processing. This is where the video card itself does various obtimization. Most common in these areas are hardware YUV->RGB conversion to blit to the frame buffer, built in resizing routines (i.e. the TNT2's 2-tap bilinear vs. the Rage 128's 4-tap bicubic), and other noise removal techniques (like ATI's new-fangled FULLSTREAM which is nothing more than a smoother performed in hardware).

The former is affected by who's writing your playback filter (ffdshow has different playback options than DivX5's filter because they implement different post processing) and how much of the various options your processor can handle. The latter is affected by the video card you're running and its drivers.

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The Wired Knight
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Post by The Wired Knight » Sat Sep 14, 2002 5:02 pm

Ram, space and codecs. These are three items Ive run into that will reduce the quality of the videos I am watching. Ram makes them skip and sometimes run slower, space tends to distort the picture and inable you to enlarge it or skip through teh file whereas a codec won't allow you to play it at all.
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Post by klinky » Sat Sep 14, 2002 5:26 pm

The Wired Knight wrote:Ram, space and codecs. These are three items Ive run into that will reduce the quality of the videos I am watching. Ram makes them skip and sometimes run slower, space tends to distort the picture and inable you to enlarge it or skip through teh file whereas a codec won't allow you to play it at all.

Define space?

Not having enough ram could cause slowdown or skipping mainly since the computer would be hitting the hard drive alot. A computer with 32MB of ram should be able to playback *most* divx files with out skipping frm lack of ram being a problem. Playing back multimedia files doesn't take alot of memory, the input buffers are rather small actually.

If you're talking about space as in hard drive space??? I don't get your assumption.

Codecs ALLOW you to playback files, they don't prevent you from doing so. With most of the DivX codecs out there they in some way support the original DivX3.11a "spec" to be backwards compatible. Some of them do a crappy job of it. While watching Noir once going through the DivX4.12 to playback the DivX3.11a files I was getting color bleeding and it looked fuzzy. I then used the original DivX3.11a codec and it worked fine.

Wired I don't know where you got those assumptions from but they're incorrect.


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The Wired Knight
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Post by The Wired Knight » Sat Sep 14, 2002 11:46 pm

Codec's came out incorrectly, I meant if he lacks the codec that the video is encoded in.

Hard drive space is what I meant by space. I've had this problem, my hard drive was really cluttered and had less than a gig left and suddenly all the videos wouldn't play right, color distortion, inability to enlarge and skipping occured. When I cleared some space and defraged they worked fine. So I know that one from experience.
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Post by Mechaman » Sun Sep 15, 2002 3:28 pm

Except that you weren't specific. "cleared some space and defragged" could have meant any of a hundred things were done, so it can't be pinpointed specifically on clearing hard drive space. Correlation does not imply causation.
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Post by Ikasu » Fri Oct 04, 2002 8:13 am

What about a computer with 2 gigs of pc2100 ddr ram that skips?...lol...Mine does sometimes....lol..But I think that's the Dual AMD MP 1800's fault....I think the person who set up my computer is a god damn idiot from the physical memory dumps I get while playing counter strike or editing with my pinnacle avi settings in premiere.....

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Post by The Wired Knight » Fri Oct 04, 2002 12:58 pm

only two gigs of space and your making AMVs? I smell hard drive crash coming.
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Post by Ikasu » Fri Oct 04, 2002 2:14 pm

2 gigs of pc2100 ddr "ram" that skips

lol...Of ram...Not hard drive space....I have two 80 gig 7,200 rpm hard drives.....one is solely used for video editing...

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Post by The Wired Knight » Fri Oct 04, 2002 2:34 pm

Oh ok, sorry, I need to read posts more carefully.
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