From: David Ross (ross_at_math.hawaii.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 07 2001 - 18:42:40 EST
> I knew it... I knew IBM chose ATI's chipset to cut costs, NOT because it
was
> a good chipset.
I don't think this is fair. The ATI is actually quite a good notebook
chipset - besides having outstanding 2D performance
and text quality (on an external display), it has some
hardware DVD acceleration built-in (so separate DVD decoding hardware is
unnecessary),
and yours evidently also has a TV-out. I don't know of any notebook chipset
that will let you do
DVD-out to a TV *and* do something else onscreen simultaneously. Some
notebooks have the appearance of
allowing this by having extra DVD-decoding hardware, entirely separate from
the video chipset, which can output
DVD either to a TV or (sometimes) to an 'overlay' window on the LCD display.
The down side of such hardware is that
you need proprietary DVD software - usually a modified version of DVD
Express - and when you use something like
PowerDVD to decode DVD to your screen, you will bypass this hardware
altogether.
Now, for your purposes the best thing would have been to have *both* the ATI
card *and* hardware decoding,
but for most people this would be redundant and an unnecessary extra
expense. I can sympathize with your
frustration, but the reason IBM omitted separate HW decoding on your laptop
was because the ATI card
is so good it doesn't need it, *not* because it is so bad! (Do the cardbus
dvd decoders
out there have their own TV-out? This would be one solution for you.)
- David R.
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