NVidia PureVideo

[gaby]

Having just got an NVidia 8300 based mobo I'm reading about PureVideo which purportedly offers hardware assisted decoding on compatible GPU's. This sounds like a great bonus and according to WikiPedia the 8300 GPU is supported by PureVideo. However I have no idea if it's being used during playback.

The NVidia site about PureVideo offers products for sale in the US but points me towards PowerDVD in the UK, the site for which offers no references to PureVideo. There's an Nvidia PureVideo trial pack which gives me the NVidia Video Decoder and NVidia Audio Decoder, both of which seem to cause problems playing back DVD's (chop, audio issues, skipping).

Am I wasting my time here? Is my understanding of PureVideo broken? From reading the Wiki page it should just be part of the drivers for my GPU but how do I check if it's in use?

[TonyXL]

It's confusing. PureVideo refers to 2 things: 1 is the **architecture** the card uses for accelerating video playback, the other is the audio/video **decoder** you can pay $25 or so for from the Nvidia website.

The goal is to get hardware accelerated playback. Your card is capable of it. You can use the PureVideo decoder for this, or another decoder like cyberlink. You can tell if acceleration is working if your CPU load is low when playing video (like 10%).

So try some other decoders that support hardware acceleration. Maybe someone can post a list of them.

[Deusxmachina]

PDVD7 is apparently basically an upgraded PureVideo. It should do everything PureVideo can do and more. PureVideo hasn't been updated in a long time.

It's nice if you can get it to work, but, personally, I wouldn't bother with PureVideo. Some people love it, others will say it's junk. It's not junk when it works, but if you search on the forums here and elsewhere, you'll see plenty of people commenting on how it's picky and touchy.

You've already gotten choppiness and all that with the trial. Point made?

I don't know if anything changed recently, but PV was only for accelerating mpeg2. If you happen to be using h.264, it's not going to help in that area.

Waste of time, imo, but it rarely hurts to experiment and see what works for you.

If your PC currently plays files fine, while getting the CPU usage lower is always nice, if it currently plays fine and does what you want, I'd seriously consider just leaving it alone and doing something else you feel like doing today.

[gaby]

PureVideo HD is the latest iteration designed to to do H264 using the GPU. I had most of it working on my old mobo, the one that I couldn't get the HDMI working on. The new one has some problems but I'm getting a copy of Vista Ultimate this week and will be doing a fresh install onto the box, just to give myself a good baseline.

I'm not adverse to spending some cash on a copy of PowerDVD 9 or something *if* it's going to provide better performance at lower CPU usage but if there are free alternatives that just work then I'll save my cash.