I have a hollywoodplus decoder card on my pII-333 with 96 meg of ram. My computer has win98. My dvd are very sharp. My vcd have alot of blockiness especially in action sequences. Connecting my computer to the tv give a little better quality but there are still a lot of blockiness. Does anyone have the same problem?

-- viet (vietnguyen25@hotmail.com), November 01, 1999

Answers

Ever get your answer? I was thinking of getting the Hollywood card. Are you getting blockiness on all vcd's? What do you think of the Hollywood card?

-- Ken Lex (w011104@hotmail.com), February 27, 2000.

I have posted a lot of good comments on this site in relation to this card and I consider it to be the best thing I have bought in the quest for better video and VCD playback on the computer in 4 or 5 years.

However, I am quite convinced that your problems will lie with the video card you may have or with the encoder your producing your VCD's with - most of us are using the Panasonic encoder.

I have an old computer (233mmx) and I recently "updated" the video card to a Voodoo3 3000 PCI and it lasted 2 weeks in my computer because it gave blocky outputs that I could not get rid of. I am back to using my old Diamond Stealth 2000 Pro card (4M) and I get full screen playback as smooth as silk with VCD's and DVD from a Pioneer 104 DVD CDrom and exceptional playback to the TV. No blockiness at all. Just because a card is designed for games does not mean they play video well it seems, particularly home brewed stuff.

The real test should come from hooking it up to a TV and looking at the image on that and then deciding what is the next action.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), February 28, 2000.

Update!

Which drivers are you using, I am quite amazed that the update on the RealMagic site to 1.8.1 creates blocky video on the TV and on the computer, I just installed it and have imediately gone back to the 1.8.0 version for a better picture.

What the h..l are they up to?

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), February 28, 2000.