Pure Digital Thought

I’m still researching all of the intricate details of the Media Center PC that I’m building. I originally planned on getting the DVD Decoder from Sonic. However, I’ve been trying some different software solutions out and I’ve hit the winner. I didn’t realize that Nvidia had PureVideo Decoder. The Platinum edition is a bit more expensive than the Sonic decoder; however, it is optimized for GeForce6 GPUs and includes features such as Dolby 5.1 and DTS passthrough. I downloaded a trial of the plugin and I’m really amazed by the quality. I played a DVD with the Nero 6 software that came with my Dual Layer Sony DVD recorder. The Nero DVD software without the Nvidia PureVideo decoder the image looked jaggy. When I fullscreened it on my monitor at 1280×1024 the image had more jaggies.

Once I installed the PureVideo decoder all of the jaggies went away. The image was smooth and nice. The decoder has settings to specify the kind of deinterlacing, audio, video overlay, etc. I was amazed when I hooked my test platform up to my DLP. The PureVideo decoder also adds HDTV resolutions to the video card settings so I was able to choose 1920×1080 and it even scaled the video up to 1080 for me. PureVideo smoothed out the video so that scaling up to 1080 didn’t cause any jaggies. I did find that PureVideo at 1080 with a DVD did a little too much smoothing with the default settings. However, pleasantly enough, you can set the sharpness of the video and other such settings to get the perfect image you’re looking for.

Of course, I’m not planning on actually playing a physical DVD. I don’t want to have to keep opening DVD cases. I’m going to archive all of my DVDs onto my hard drive. I found a neat piece of software called DVD Shrink (Google for it as I will not link to it). Basically, it allows you make a perfect backup archive of your DVDs. However, it also has cool features such as compression and remastering. Compression will drop the quality a little but will make a smaller file size so I ignore this feature as I’m planning on having the space. Remastering is awesome. It allows you to selectively pick what you want to archive. I only want the movie and either the DTS or Dolby5.1 audio track. So, you can cut the menus, subtitles, alternate crappy audio, commercial, etc from the DVD that you didn’t even want in the first place. Even better, you can combine different disks onto one DVD archive! I’ve planning on testing this out by combining the two DVD disks from myLoTR: The Two Towers extended edition DVD set into one DVD file.

I’ve tested Windows Media Center 2005 with an archive of my Monsters, Inc. DVD and MCE does indeed recognize the DVD archive on a hard drive and plays it flawlessly. So, I’m all set for that. I just need to make sure I have as much hard drive space as possible to keep my DVD archive. Monsters, Inc. at full quality was 3.86 GB. I’m guessing I’ll be needing almost 1 TB of disk space which is easy to obtain. The only thing holding me back from ordering two 500GB disks is ensuring that those disks won’t run noisy and hot. So, I’m still researching disks. But for now, I’m dead set on Nvidia PureVideo and a cheap Nvida card, possibly the GeForce 6200, to go with it.