6. NVDVD: Another Option That Might Be Coming To A Notebook Near You!

Our test notebook was loaded with the latest version of NVIDIA's new NVDVD playback software. Although we don't yet know what systems are going to include this software, we jumped at the chance to have sneak peek at NVDVD.

NVDVD has been in development at NVIDIA for some time, and we have been eagerly anticipating it's release. A lot of what we found in NVDVD we have seen in other DVD playback software, but it was interesting to see what kind of spin NVIDIA would be able to put on it.

Our test system featured the new nVDVD playback software. We thought the performance was good and it ran well during our testing. It will be up to OEMs whether to include nVDVD with your NVIDIA product purchase.

NVIDIA claims that this is the first DVD playback software that is completely built and engineered from the ground up, specifically for NVIDIA products. This should give NVIDIA an advantage, because NVDVD is designed to take advantage of the features that are unique to NVIDIA platform products.

NVDVD was designed to provide seamless video playback, high-quality audio, and reduced CPU utilization and power consumption. NVDVD supports MPEG-2 video and audio decoding, including support for hardware motion compensation, inverse discrete cosine transformation (IDCT), and inverse quantization (IQ).

NVDVD targets the goal of achieving higher quality output by supporting adaptive de-interlacing and scaling algorithms that are already present on NVIDIA GPUs in order to deliver playback at HDTV-quality resolutions.

NVDVD's other features include: advanced frame capture; auto-resume; digital vibrance control (DVC); and nView support. We had a chance to test the advanced frame capture and auto-resume feature. Both of these features worked very well, and we found them to be both easy to use and useful.

Depending on the version, NVDVD can include full Dolby Digital support and is able to output this via a digital output if available on your system for external decoding. Of course, this will depend on the compatibility of your sound card.

NVDVD is optimized for performance and is fully Windows Hardware Quality Labs- (WHQL) certified for use with Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows ME. NVDVD is optimized to take advantage of MMX, Intel SSE, and AMD 3Dnow.

NVDVD, which will be included free with some systems, and is a great player with a lot of very flexible features. Although it might not be as robust as some of the other solutions available, we found it to perform well and think it is definetely worth considering.

NVDVD can be licensed by OEMs for distribution, but it is up to the OEM. The OEMs will choose to license NVDVD, or not. This of course means that you will find it bundled with some notebooks and not with others. The same will hold true for desktop NVIDIA cards as well, you will find it included with some cards and not with others. We could not confirm if NVDVD will be offered with Dell products at this time. Our questions on this subject were answered with a very solid "No Comment".