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I remember buying my first hardware DVD accelerator back in 1998. Back in the good old days of the Pentium MMX and Windows 95, buying a DVD drive was a big deal. As a conduit for films, it was just taking off, making it worthwhile to investigate using my PC for playback; dedicated DVD decks were still very highly priced. And despite MMX power on my CPU, it never felt quite right running a software DVD application, skipped frames were definitely the norm. A solution needed to be found, as I was hooked on the new video format.

The only real consumer choice back then was supplied by Creative. The DXR2 bundle featured a DVD drive (five-speed no less!) and the real reason you were buying it, the DXR2 decoder itself. The DXR2 did full MPEG-2 video decoding on its processor, with a pass-through cable used to connect it between the output of your video accelerator and your monitor. Much like 3dfx with its early Voodoo 3D accelerators, the pass-through method worked quite well, although your 2D desktop display quality took a hit. The S-Video output was the preferred method of display, using your television. A simple DVD player application took care of the incantation and black magic needed to invoke the DXR2 and bring it to life.

And so MPEG-2 DVD video decoding was brought to the masses, I was very happy, no more skipped frames to suffer, and the rest of the world seemed to agree. These days things are little different. We still tend to rely on hardware to decode our DVD video on the PC, the difference being it’s now done on your graphics card, no pesky pass-through or added PCI boards, GPUs do all the hard work. Video quality doesn’t suffer as a result and software applications are able to make use of the hardware to do the job.

Popular software DVD players have long hooked into the DirectShow interfaces provided by DirectX, Microsoft’s all encompassing suite of multimedia APIs, with your graphics card driver exposing the interface needed to do MPEG-2 video on the GPU. Meanwhile all of this is transparent to you, the user. Tick the little ‘Use Hardware Acceleration’ box in WinDVD or PowerDVD and that’s what’s happening.

However the relentless march of the semiconductor means that we’ve nearly come full circle. Processing power for tasks like MPEG-2 decoding, at the same time as running your operating system and performing other tasks can be easily handled by a modern CPU. So while you can still tick the Use Hardware Acceleration box in your favourite software DVD player and offload to your graphics card GPU, it’s not necessary to do so in order to achieve smooth playback.

It’s this that Cyberlink is keen to exploit. While GPU-based DVD decode is very welcome, it’s the GPU’s very nature as a fixed function device, when it comes to DVD playback at least, that means that often there’s inflexibility in its approach. It might decode the video data at full speed, but does it do hardware gamma adjust, automatically adjusting brightness and contrast to suit the scene being played? Can it do all the de-interlacing and scaling needed for a perfect picture? If not, can we use the CPU for that? And let’s not forget the audio side of things too, there’s still room for improvement there.

Cyberlink thinks it’s worth using the CPU in anger again, revamping the way its software DVD player does things. The latest version of its PowerDVD software, Version 5.0 Deluxe, offers a fair amount of new features over the outgoing Version 4, not only in terms of the video playback, but also audio wise too.

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