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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (34903)	4/4/2001 6:55:24 PM
From: andreas_wonisch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Joe, Re: I am using version 0.6 beta. I picked the MMX optimization. It is using both CPUs, but the overall utilization is only slightly above 50%, with load going back and forth between the CPUs. Ah, then you already have the newest version. I just checked a two weeks old article from Tom's Hardware Germany (http://www.tomshardware.de/video/01q1/010316/index.html) and apparently dual CPU support is still broken. According to this article the PIII (and probably Celeron also) work best with the MMX iDCT code. I am using a dll called bbMPEG for output. I am not quite clear about the interaction between this DLL and FLASK itself. It's used as an codec to generate the MPEG output file (Flask itself only decodes the MPEG2 stream). You can get even better results with an Panasonic MPEG decoder but IIRC it isn't free. DIVX (MPEG4) offers more flexibility but you can't play these files with your DVD player. But the quality is far superior to VCD. What kind of DVD player are you using that lets you do this? Anything special? Does it have some kind of Region coding hack? I guess the DVD must be doing something to change the frame rate so that it can play on your PAL TV (or do you have a special TV that supports both?) I'm using my DVD-ROM (from Pioneer with a region-free ROM) and a MPEG card from Creative (also region-free). The reason I'm using a MPEG card is that the quality is much better than with a software decoder and I can get AC3 output. Of course I don't watch DVDs on my monitor, so I'm using a looong cable to the TV set. The MPEG card can convert PAL streams to NTSC (and vice versa) and it works fine. But since my TV supports NTSC anyway I don't have to use this feature. BTW, I believe most DVD players can be hacked to make them region-free, at least those that are sold in Germany. It's probably also possible with some US players. Of course, your TV still needs to support PAL. BTW, did I mention that I hate Hollywood for coming up with the Region coding? Apparently they don't want us to watch US flicks early (sometimes before they appear in the cinemas here). But fortunately the mechanism can be tricked easily. Andreas