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Does the Radeon Mac Edition have a DVD decoder?
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Moderator  Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: Arizona
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Hello.
I was wondering if anybody knew if the Radeon Mac Edition (not the 7000) has built-in hardware DVD decoding capability? I know DVD playback works under OS X, but I am selling one of these cards and the potential buyer is running OS 9 and wants to know if it has hardware DVD decoding.
Thanks peoples.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Feb 2003
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Hi,
I'm not sure how much of it is done in hardware, but my original PCI Mac Radeon could be used to watch DVDs in Mac OS 9 on a rev. A Beige G3 (450MHz). It worked with Apple's standard DVD player, not the one written for the hardware decoder found in a few Macs.
I seem to remember that I had to used a hacked version of the DVD player mind. The hack just turned off some hardware check.
DVD performance was fine on my 450MHz G3.
Hope this helps.
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Moderator  Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Atlanta, GA
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This ATI page doesn't seem to say anything about DVD decoding.
And this XLR8YourMac review seems to indicate that most of the DVD decoding was software-based.
So my hunch would be 'no' but I can't say for certain.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Mar 2000
Location: Edmonds, WA, USA
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Much of the video DVD decoding can be done on ATI hardware (Rage 128s and Radeons) like hardware IDCT and subpicture overlay support. The software is basically there to separate the streams (video, audio, menus, etc) and then send it off to the appropriate decoder. The old DVD daughter card that came on Rage 128s in earlier G3s did all of the decoding. On NVIDIA cards, more of the video stream has to be done in software which is typically why on older systems, DVD playback with NVIDIA cards wasn't that great. More CPU had to be used. I think that's one of the reasons why the PowerMac G4 466 shipped with an ATI Rage 128 rather than a GF MX card.
An ATI engineer (Arshad) actually wrote the original MacOS DVD API. There's a terrific post at Accelerate Your Mac's BBS by Arshad regarding DVD playback but you won't find the post with a search. Thank goodness for google:
http://bbs.xlr8yourmac.com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/000396.html
Any of the posts by Arshad are filled with tons of information in that thread.
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Moderator Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: Arizona
Status:
Offline
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Thanks guys. 
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I like chicken
I like liver
Meow Mix, Meow Mix
Please de-liv-er
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