Old PC (Inspiron 7000) - Luxsonor H/W dvd accelerator

[dinkob]

It must have been a while that someone has heard of one of these separate DVD decoder cards but this laptop does come with it.

I reloaded the OS with everything successfully but PowerDVD complains about H/W acceleration.

Both Power DVD (no HW accel enabled) and WinDVD have frameskipping while WinDVD can't quite tell me if HW is seen properly.

Both software's see the hardware accelerator as ATI although my device manager clearly states Luxsonor DVD decoder LS242 I think.

However, Dell does have this Player on it's own which plays DVD's quite perfectly (8.00 Mbps bitrate without any frameskipping - NOW THIS Amazed me! - keep in mind this is P 2 300 Mhz with 160 RAM), although it's confused about the menu's and etc. I also don't have much picture control on this software (vivid, bright, etc.) Hmm, maybe I should try WinMP9 on this Win98 System to see if it could pull up hardware decoder properly.

However, I like to see Power DVD say such and such hardware decoder in use (when you look under Information tab) - as then I know this is as good as it gets with this laptop.

Is there an older evaluation version of Power DVD 2.5 or 3.0 that I could try to see if it can detect my hardware accelerator?

I read on google that PowerDVD XP has a problem with this type of a decoder in general so I was thinking that other versions might do it.

[dinkob]

Well it looks like I found the answer on my own.

PowerDVD won't do it no matter what. I did try the version 3 (I had to use a Ghost Image from one of my older Emachine-s) and it did detect and played it as ATI DVD acceleration (still not LuxSonor) as opposed to PowerDVDXP 4. Now the questionable portion was the picture quality as there was a lot of frameskipping and noticeable stair-stepping.

However, it looks like the Dell DVD player is the only player that can play it properly - with no Frameskipping (picture looks much smoother though, not as sharp but still quite impressive - it's got a good depth feel to it; and keep in mind this IS Pentium 2 300 Mhz).

So anyways, thanks for reading.

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