DVD Maestro and creative dxr2 dvd encoder card

[THE RIPPER]

Was wondering if anybody is familiar with this card? Will i get preview capabilities?

[THE RIPPER]

Bump

[ofbarea]

I do not know what do you mean by preview but I will write a few thoughts on this card.

Note that this card is not the same as the creative CT7160 inlay card.

The Dxr2 card (CT7120) is a PCI 2.1 decoder card. It has VGA input and output connectors, video output (composite and S-video), and a COAX SPDIF digital audio output (supports AC3). Thanks to the ZiVA-DS chipset, it can handle DVD, AC3 to stereo down mixing, VCD 2.0 and DVD decryption completely done in hardware.

Dxr2 can handle concurrent display of a movie to both PC screen and to TV. The problem is that the overlay function is not polished enough and you it does nots upport refresh rates of over 72 Hz. AC-3 and TV output are great. The card does not have external stereo output, like the DXR3, but it does include an internal one. It has a couple of audio inputs for CD audio bypass. The maximum resolution supported in windows is 1280x1024 using Video overlay.

This card requires very little CPU power, according to Creative, you need at least a 100 Mhz Pentium CPU when used with W9x. I have tested it in W2K and it worked just fine. WXP should also work.

Finally it appears that the Dxr2 card does not function properly with AMD Athlon CPUs. I imagine that newer AMD CPUs will suffer the same problem. For more details on this matter go to this link http://www.3dsoundsurge.com/archive/week91.html and read the Athlon and the Dxr2 will never work together entry. I think this is a restriction on Windows drivers. Linux drivers should be OK.

You can find a good review in here: http://www.9-muses.com/freak/reviews_more.php?id=39_0_2_0

You can find some windows utilities in this link: http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/techie/623/page4.html

There are Linux drivers for this card. Look for them in here: http://opensource.creative.com/

OS/2 drivers are not available. There was an attempt to develop one in 2000 but it ended in 2001. http://home1.gte.net/vzn05zki/contest.htm

The card uses the following chips:

U1: National Semiconductor, part 74AD DS963 BCM.
U2: Auravision, AnP82 BPQ, Direct Overlay Video Enhancer (Video DAC), Not very good at refresh rates of over 73 Hertz.
U3: Brooktree, Bt865AKPF, Video Encoder, YCrCb to NTSC/PAL
U4: Texas Instruments, TL072C
U5: Philips, 74F14D
U6: NPNX, NN514265J-50, 4 Mbit EDO DRAM
U7: Burr-Brown, PCM1723E, Stereo DAC
U8: Philips, 74HCT14D
U9: Philips, 74F125D
U10: Toshiba, TC6807AF. Copy protection. Not installed in later cards, like mine, because this function is performed by ZiVA-DS DVD decoder (U13)
U11: Creative Labs, CT7115-OAP, ???
U12: Auravision, Video Stream Processor, Big chip close to pci connector.
U13: LSI Logic (C-Cube), ZiVA-DS, second generation DVD decoder, Big chip at top of the card
U14: ICS MicroClock, MK2751-03S, clock
U15: Atmel, AT24C01A, 1Kbit EEPROM
U16: NPNX, NN514265J-50, 4 Mbit EDO DRAM
U17: NPNX, NN514265J-50, 4 Mbit EDO DRAM
U18: NPNX, NN514265J-50, 4 Mbit EDO DRAM
U19: NPNX, NN514265J-50, 4 Mbit EDO DRAM
U20: NPNX, NN514265J-50, 4 Mbit EDO DRAM

Documentation for the most important ones could be found in here:
- http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/video/dvd/encore/
- http://www.geocities.com/dxr2linux/docs/