The New AMD Building Thread

right click which audio output you want, properties and then IICR the final tab has audio quality.

 

Sam,
It was just the fact that they were hooked up that way ever since I got the Optical to work on my Sony. I didn't find a single suggestion on line, to check that. The reason it is always hooked up is because people are always asking if the S/PDIF sound is better. I usually throw on some music or start off with the Analog playing a Dolby Surround sound track from a DVD, and just reach over and flip it to optical, just to see the expression on their face. Or, some Theater Organ music, live with my computer generated Wurlitzer. Shakes the house pretty good. It's equal to about 12 lbs. of air pressure. Haven't broken any light bulbs with it yet, but I have broken a few with the real thing. How that 10" Woofer can handle the 32' Bass notes and not turn into shredded wheat, is beyond me. You can't hear any apparent Doubling, so it's got to be a very well made Woofer! You more feel the 32' pipes, than hear them at the lowest notes. The lowest Bass note is 12 cycles It's the difference between Loud and Powerful! The Woofer can blow out a candle from about 1' away! Anyway, that's why I had all of them hooked up.

I like Power DVD for it's sound and picture quality, although Nero Showtime does give a beautiful picture, just a little weak in the sound department, compared to Power DVD. Power DVD led the pack by about 2 Generations, as far back as Power DVD 6, in both sound and picture Quality. I've used it since version 4!

I also forgot to mention that the version of win 7 I have, was downloaded in July, directly from Micro$oft, so it's very new, maybe even the latest as it hasn't asked me to allow a single upgrade yet.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Thanks shaff!

Russ

 

As I say, I'm pretty certain I left my 3.5mm analog connectors plugged in when I switched to optical, I think it worked fine, but I'll have to test again when I get back to York in a month's time, where my optical speakers are.

 

The NEW VLC is HD , VERY NICE Picture
I like the fast forward on the numbers keypad + or -

 

VLC has been able to play HD content for years... :S

 

russ why not upgrade to the newest powerdvdv?

 

What, has no one else tried arcsoft totalmedia theatre 3? It really is good!

Granted, it's not freeware

 

No excuse for a media player to not be free really, since so many others are

 

I think they were one of the first to support Blu Ray. That's why I tried it It's only crashed a couple times in months.

 

Shaff,
I have PowerDVD 9, and it looks just as bad. it really doesn't matter, as it's the way Win7 scales the video. The screen resolution of the video is different between XP and Win7. The native resolution is 1680x1050. I've tried hardware interlacing and lowering the resolution, and the DVDs all come up in some strange setting, that isn't even as wide as the screen, but commercial DVDs play just fine, and at the proper resolution. there is so much aliasing that the edges of things, particularly curves look like saw blades. the picture looks like you are trying to watch it with tiny vertical blinds in front of it, partially closed. The further away something appears in the background, the worse it looks. The picture has herringbone stripes in it, real tiny ones, but it has all these little jaggles within the vertical rows of LCDs. Jpg, gif and BMP pictures look excellent, clear as a bell. I'm waiting on a friend of mine to bring his 1080p monitor over to see if that helps any.

I tried an experiment last night. I made a copy of Wal-E. It looks great with XP, but only the original looks good in Win7. The copy looks like crap! It almost seems like micro$oft detects that it's a copy (a legitimate one, in this instance since I own the original), and deliberately makes any copy look bad. The copy looks great when played in XP! It wouldn't surprise me one bit if Win7 didn't nacker the video when it detects what they feel is an illegal copy. Bill Gates has gotten so obsessed with control and security. Win7 makes it quite plain that it wants you to do things their way, and makes it really hard to change some things. Gates has gotten to be such a control freak, almost as bad as Steve Jobs, and he wrote the book on being a control Freak!

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to like with Win7, but some of the simplest things can be so difficult to do. I still haven't figured out how to make the computer "Select All" in a folder when you want to move files from one place to another. It's marginally faster in benchmarks than XP, and certainly better than Vista. It's also not quite as stable as XP. I had to up my CPU voltage and CPU NB VID so it wouldn't BSOD when running DVDRB/CCE with Win7. You would think that if the computer was 100% stable with XP, it would have the same stability with Win7, but it doesn't. Heat is not the issue either, as the CPU only hits a max of 43C, and the motherboard a max of 40C when running rebuilder. Even stress testing with multi-core Prime95 at 100% load only gets the CPU temp to 47C!

Russ

 

Dvd backups look fine on my screen. Provided they are at least ~3,000KB/s. Players/codecs definitely have their differences. The default renderer in dvd shrink looks like total garbage. I leave it like that though, because most of the other settings require disabling Aero, which I find quite irritating. Even WMP 12 plays my backups agreeably Surely somethings buggered on your system. Whether its hardware or drivers is to be determined. Nero showtime was a good player too, but I think there was an audio issue last time I had it installed. For playing blu ray anyway. I think it lacked a codec. Which is probably easily fixed. But I bumped into the Arcsoft player solution, and haven't looked back

 

russ could you give us pics of both xp and win7 screenshots.

 

Ctrl+A for select all, been that way since Win95.
As for the copy protection, no such thing exists. Windows does not alter image quality on videos that are pirate, it can't tell

 

True but for the record VLC has mediocre image quality. Its one redeeming feature is its ability to play absolutely any file ever. I find though that Media Player Classic with the K-Lite Standard codec pack I can play everything with fantastic image quality and DXVA. So VLC is extremely simple, and MPC takes some configuration to get it working to the fullest...

 

Shaff,
I was going to do just that, but I have a small problem. My computer died! Not what you think though! LOL!! I had just gotten up, and hadn't even turned on my computer yet. I was in the bathroom and suddenly the lights got very bright, and the couple of incandescent bulbs in the bathroom blew out. there was a lot of noise coming from behind my house, then the lights went out. I was eating lunch when they came back on, so I finished lunch and then turned on the computer. The lights came on the fans were working and the two optical drives addressed themselves. Then it shut down. Hasn't worked since!

Some guy got lost or something and wound up taking out a power transmission pole, which are spaced about 300' apart. The wire whipped back and got our power pole in the back alley, and just fried the ground leg. The Earth ground is a pole that is only in the ground 6 to 8 feet. Since there's been no rain since February, it's not a very good ground. I'm inclined to think that since the computer wasn't even on, and nothing looks or smells burnt, I'm going to RMA the motherboard to GigaByte. I'm not feeling good, so I'll check the CPU and memory in Oxi in the morning. It was working fine when I went to bed, and it didn't make any strange noises or pops when I did turn it on. All seemed normal for about 4 seconds, and then no power. no post or beeps, no nothing. The guy from the power company seems to think that there may have been some feedback through the ground system, but the PSU is good , as it was the first thing I checked. It fired up the guy across the street's Intel Quad rig. I don't see any way that there could have been a voltage problem with the neutral leg, through the ground leg, without damaging the PSU, or blowing the surge Protector in it. I just hope the CPU is still good, or I'll have to RMA that as well! I'm using an old Optiplex GX150 right now, and will be for a few days. Oh well, what are you going to do! Just one more challenge! LOL!!

Russ

 

Wow, no surge protector on the mains to your PC?
That's unlucky, one advantage of underground electricity cabling I suppose.

 

No surge protector would certainly do it. We had someone hit the electrical box in front of our house a few years ago and it took out the fan controller on my Enermax Liberty 620W. This was with a surge protector BTW. All the lights in the house flickered for a second, then everything shut off. After the power was restored, I turned on my PC to hear the PSU fan maxed out. Weird as it didn't affect any other components...

Also just for the record. Most surge protectors are designed only to protect your PC once. They have a an overload circuit fuse that, once blown, is usually non-replaceable. You must buy a whole new surge protector or you no longer have the protection. I bought a rather high end Belkin(~$100) to make sure I got one with a replaceable fuse. Have had to replace the fuse twice since owning it. Once from an electrical storm, and once for the when the junction box got taken out.

 

Surely you wouldn't be able to use it without though? As in, the surge protector stops any current flowing once it's blown. If it just suddenly becomes not protected after one surge with no way of knowing, that's pretty bad :S

 

Finally got the 1200Rpm scythe back in my secondary. I was running a 1900Rpm scythe. That sucker was fairly obnoxious. Forgot how quiet my secondary could be. My secondary may very well be slightly quieter than my primary now. But my primary has 4X the hardware too
I live on the dangerous side. My power strips aren't protected LOL! Nah, I think they are, but I really should replace them. I've been concerned lately about my video playing properly. The other day, I was kicked back, and my foot bumped one of the cords under my desk. The video paused for a half a moment, right when my foot made contact with the cord. Coincidence? I think not LOL! Power strips are fairly cheap on newegg too. Guess I'm going to the bank this morning so I can prepare for a newegg order