I've been having a love affair over the past two years or so,
but it's not a secret one. In fact, my fiancee knows all about it. It began
when I first discovered the world of DVD.
When I first bought a Dxr2 decoder card with the Creative DVD-ROM drive,
at around £225 it was considerably cheaper than the standalone models
on the shelf and with my TV in close enough distance to the PC, linking to
the big screen wasn't a problem. Since moving house, the TV is a couple of
feet further away, but a male-female joining lead solved the problem.
What hit me first, apart from the stunning pictures produced, was when Home
Cinema Choice's gadget guru Bob Tomalski gave the product a glowing
review. There was me originally thinking that a PC item for a third of the
price of some players around at the time couldn't hope to match their quality,
when it was found to score higher than some of those very standalones.
Hence, I had high hopes for the Dxr3, although I had heard over the past few
months that the TV-out quality wasn't as good, but a phone call to Creative
themselves confirmed that the latest drivers at the time solved any such
problems. Now I have experienced this PC DVD setup for myself, their words
were a falsehood.
So, I've said how good the Dxr2 is, but what are the advantages with the
Dxr3? First, the software includes support for DTS: Digital Theatre Sound.
It's impressive and in some cases sounds more meaty, but I have very few
DVDs with DTS compared to those I have which aren't Region 2 (see later for
why this is important) and for some reason it didn't play the DTS bonus track
on the Region 2
Eagles: Hell Freezes Over.
The DVD drive is a 12-speed one, used for transferring DVD-ROM material not
showing DVD films at any faster than standard single speed, so if you plan
to install many programs from DVD-ROMs (of which there aren't very many
yet), consider this an advantage over the 5-speed DVD-ROM drive which
accompanied the Dxr2 card.
Two DVDs themselves are also included - the IMAX film Super Speedway
and a DVD-ROM edition of Outcast, which includes plenty of
behind-the-scenes-type info about the game.
And now the problems...
1. Firstly and probably most importantly, no official firmware update has been
released to allow region-free playback. For the uninitiated, this is a
software patch that updates the drive and stops it complaining every time
you, for example, put in an American DVD instead of the British ones you're
more used to buying.
When you install the kit in the first place, it asks you for a region and
this can only be changed a further four times. After that you're stuck with
it. So, the answer would normally be to ignore than and pay a visit to
www.visualdomain.net,
where Remote Selector can be downloaded and instructed to
select a particular region or disable the region check altogether!
2. After pausing or moving to another chapter, the picture stutters three
times (sound is fine though) before carrying on as normal. It occasionally does
this at other times for no reason. I can understand it happening while I'm
in DOS (yes, I use an antequated email program but prefer it to anything
in Windows), but have had no such problems when using Windows programs such
as Wordperfect 6.1 at the same time with the Dxr2. When using the Dxr3, yes
there are problems.
3. The card is slow to process things when skipping through several
chapters at a time.
4. Pressing stop takes half-a-second to stop rather than instantly
like the Dxr2,
5. Moving between menus is a now a pain with this. I use the keyboard as
a rule and when changing menus, it seems to make the system 'Alt-TAB' away to
something else so I can't access the menu functions and need to 'Alt-TAB' back
again. Why?! This never happened with the Dxr2. A workaround is to use the
aforementioned Remote Selector from
www.visualdomain.net.
6. Setting the sound was initially problematic. For both the Dxr2 and Dxr3
decoder cards there is an 'advanced' tab, but only in the latter is it
highlighted and there I had to select "AC3" for Dolby Digital sound, but it
was something I had to find out for myself.
7. Unlike the Dxr2, you can't see the DVD picture window on both the PC
and the TV at the same time. Creative's online support confirmed this but
offered no reason why this should be the case.
8. For some inexplicable reason, I heard no main menu sound in some cases
that I tried. One such DVD, for example, was Made in Britain.
Many thanks to Erwin van den Berg from
www.visualdomain.net
who answers some of the above questions with technical info that proves why
the Dxr3 is a sub-standard piece of kit compared to its older brother:
1. DTS: The Dxr2 can also output DTS on the spdif, only Creative refuses to
upgrade the Dxr2 software to allow this. Their argument that the Dxr2 was made
before DTS came to dvd is bogus.
Alas, this doesn't mean that you can use Dxr3 software with the Dxr2 card
to solve the problem.
2. The Dxr3 is a RealMagic Hollywood+ as you probably know, and it is a much
cheaper board than the Dxr2 due to intergration of chips. The reason for Creative
to upgrade is simply one of production costs. However, the Hollywood+ does less
processing in the decoder and leans thus more on the CPU. Sound decoding for
instance is done on the CPU. Also the H+ has only 1 ramdac, so you can only have
vga output OR tv output since it is handled in the same chip. The Dxr2 has a lot
of chips, each with their own function.
The C-Cube Ziva decrypts and decodes the
stream (audio and video) and outputs a CCIRR 601 video stream to both the tv
encoder and the vga 'linedoubler' (the so called Dxr2, Dynamic eXtented
Resolution, which converts interlaced signal to progressive and thus 'doubles' the
number of lines) and outputs the audio directly via i2s to the onboard dac and
spdif transmitter. So the Dxr2 handles almost all dvd processing, the cpu only has
to navigate and deliver the data from the dvd to the Dxr2 board. The name 'Dxr3'
has nothing to do with line tripling.
3. The components used on the Dxr2 are really first class (maybe even 'high-end'),
like the Burr-Brown DAC (also used in the most expensive Denon processors) and
Brooktree tv encoder (with 10bits processing in a time that all 'normal' dvd
player only used 8 or 9 bits per color).
This also means that the board is probably pretty expensive. The Dxr2 is based
on a reference board made by Auravision, the makers of the VxP524 (Dxr2) chip.
They only changed the Analog Devices ADV7175 tv encoder for the Brooktree one.
Nice detail is that the ADV7175 is used on the H+ and thus on the Dxr3 (although
some people claim there board uses a ADV7170 or even the brooktree).
The only real problem with the Dxr2 is the AuraVision AnP82 Analog vga overlay chip,
which is really crap. So the Dxr2 is unbeatable for tv and analog audio, the Dxr3 is
better for use on a PC monitor (although I would recommend a software player like
PowerDVD if your PC is fast enough (P2 300). I really do not understand people
upgrading from a Dxr2 to a Dxr3 if they use it on tv. Also upgrading from a 2x to
5x/6x/8x/10x/12x drive is useless, DVD video is 1x !
It's simply a budget board at a premium price! As a result, the marketing
people couldn't name it the Dxr1, because nobody would buy it so they
pretended that it is a better board, so they could even ask a higher price and
make much more profit.
Overall, I'm baffled. Why does a next-generation product have so many things
changed for the worse? It's not necessary and is really annoying. There's a
thick manual included but it's largely unhelpful past installation as it
just details the same thing in a million languages.
Hence, for the time being and until the decoder software problems and the
lack of region-free playback in the drive can be resolved, I shall be sticking
with my original Dxr2 card and 5-speed drive setup and I'd advise everyone
to plump for a Dxr2 and never a Dxr3.
And yes, I did try the latest drivers (this review was placed online on
October 2nd, 2000 and the beta drivers online were from June 2000) but to
no avail.
This product is also rather overpriced now. As I mentioned earlier, the price
of my original setup was very competitive compared to the stand-alone
market. These days with the age of the easily-made-region-free Wharfdale 750
player which only costs a penny under £180, sub-£100 players
on the way and decent PC DVD decoder cards and drives available for around
£60 apiece... well, you do the math.
And don't forget the Playstation 2, due out on November 24th, seemingly
with improved decoding ability to rival dedicated DVD players. Until I can
get hold of one of those, I'll have to stick with a PC DVD variant - for
one reason I've run out of plug sockets!
This product was tested on a PC with the following spec:
Intel PIII 600Mhz, 128Mb RAM (133 Mhz), Voodoo 3 3000 AGP, Soundblaster
Live! 1024, attached to a Sony STR-DB930 Dolby Digital/DTS amplifier
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
