600X DVD playback! Is it good using PowerDVD or WinDVD

[Guest]

Since their is only a 4M video card in the 600X; how is the dvd playback?

I am thinking about replacing a DVD-ROM with a DVD/CD-RW. What do I need to get to do that Ultrabay 2000 compatible or what? I am not familiar with the Thinkpad swapping terms.

Also, can I get this optical DVD CD-RW for a $100?

Try to decide if I want to be a custom notebbok builder; that is if it is worth it!



Thanks!

[MadeInJapan]

Look on eBay and if you're lucky you'll find one for about $100. Also, look on www.pricewatch.com Sometimes I find better deals there and they are new and under warranty. Definitely PowerDVD is better than WinDVD. I have it on all of my machines, laptops and desktops alike. Ultrabay2000 has a slimmer or "notched out" faceplate on the right side of the drawer opening. UltraSlimBay (600 series) is not notched...the fadeplate is uniform all the way across the opening area. Although the 12.5~12.7 mm drive fits both the UltraSlimBay of the 600 series and the Ultrabay2000 of the T-series and some others (I believe also some R series), they take a different bezel or bracket that goes on the drive itself. The bare drives (ones without the bezel) are compatible to both types of machines....In otherwords, the bezel and notched, or not notched is what makes the difference. You want the not-notched drive for the 600 series. Most of the time these drives are sold as "bare drives," and you have to take the bracket off of the drive that is presently in your drivebay and put it on the new one. The DVD playback on the 600E is touch and go but on the 600X it is fine. Good luck and let us know how things turn out.

[whizkid]

If you want to use the video-out connector on your 600X (side question: Is that jack on All 600X?) to play a DVD, you have to set your video depth to 16-bit. (At least you had to on Win98. I haven't tried with XP.)

For me, that was simply unacceptable as it introduced a lot of banding in almost every scene in every movie. Blue sky? Not quite, more like horizontal blue stripes... or blue circles around the sun. ugh.

[JHEM]

Whiz,

If you set the resolution to 800X600 or, even better 640X480, and 16BIT color depth, all of those problems disappear.

I used to use my 600X to play DVDs on the boats and it was always an excellent picture without moire' artifacts as you describe.

You have to remember that a standard US NTSC TV is 480X440 resolution. Feeding it more info than that results in the picture you experienced.

Regards,

James

[sktn77a]

Bill Morrow sells a DVD/CDRW for the 600 series. It does everything except hot swap. www.thinkpads.com

[whizkid]

James, it's got nothing to do with resolution.

If you have 16 bit color, there are only five bits for red and blue (and either five or six for green). That means 32 shades of blue, and one of those is black!

I don't see a moire interference pattern, I see banding. Also called posterization. Here's a link with a severe demonstration of going from 24-bit to 8- and 6-bit color: http://www.inkjetart.com/2450/48bit/page2.html

I supposed really good playback software would dither the colors together and mask the effect, but I only tried the MediaMatic software that came with the machine. Glah.

[monty cantsin]

If you have 16 bit color, there are only five bits for red and blue (and either five or six for green). That means 32 shades of blue, and one of those is black!

I don't see a moire interference pattern, I see banding. Also called posterization. Here's a link with a severe demonstration of going from 24-bit to 8- and 6-bit color: http://www.inkjetart.com/2450/48bit/page2.html

No, not true. Playing videos is a hardware feature of the graphic chip and is done independently of the color depth of the desktop. Actually you don't even need a graphical desktop for that, software like mplayer can show videos in plain old text mode, for instance:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/images/shot06.jpg

http://www.slider.be/screenshots/mplayer.png

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/images ... dix-01.jpg

It works like this: The software creates a box in a certain color and does some basic video decoding. On the first picture above, this box is exactly 44x14 characters large. Then the video chip itself draws the video into the box (also scales and smooths it, if necessary). This is called an 'overlay'.

This is also the reason why you can't simply take screen shots from a video, so that most software players have a special snapshot function built in for that purpose. Try it yourself. Play a video in Windows Media Player and press the PrintScr key to take a screenshot, then open your preferred image editing software and paste it in. You'll see that (provided you have an older system that only utilizes such simple overlays and nothing more sophisticated), the video information is missing from the screen dump. With some older video chipsets (like the 256AV) you'll even have a 'hole' in that place. Open a video in your player again, place the image editor in front of it, drag it around, and you can see the current video playing through the box where the old video still should have been on your screen dump.

Another example: My ThinkPad 570, P2-333, with the NeoMagic MediaMagic 256AV 2.5MB chipset (same as in the 600E, the 600X has the 256ZX with 4MB) only shows me a slideshow when playing DVDs in XGA 24-bit on XP Pro. That's because the rendering of the video has to be done completely in software, as, with that small amount of video memory, there's nothing left to create an overlay that's large enough (I think 320x200 is the maximum that can be created with the 256AV in 24-bit XGA, not at all sufficient for DVDs). At XGA 16-bit, however, large overlays are possible, so the video plays much better, but is still quite jerky (because of an ineffective video driver, not due to hardware restrictions; the drivers that are available for Linux don't show such performance problems with overlays at higher resolutions). When I reduce the resolution furthermore to VGA (640x480) 8-bit (!), it plays absolutely fine. There is absolutely no banding because the video output into the overlay is totally controlled by the video chip. The desktop displays in 256 colors, but the video is in true color, 24-bit, 16 million colors.

I supposed really good playback software would dither the colors together and mask the effect, but I only tried the MediaMatic software that came with the machine. Glah.

No, there's not a single software decoder out there which does it, because it simply isn't necessary. To 'dither' implies drawing a high-res video in software, but this is extremely CPU-intensive and not very practical. A P3 at 1Ghz or even faster processors would be far away from playing any DVD smoothly.

With mplayer under Linux, even a TP 600 with a P2-266 can play DVDs absolutely fine, provided that everything is configured properly!