DVD into Video-in?

[Cheeshead]

I have a Kenwood hometheather DVD player..I was wondering if the Marvel g400 will allow me to input the video onto my monitor. I don't want to capture the dvd video, just use the monitor as a "TV".. I read a review stating that the Marvel won't allow the recording of copyrighted video. I have contacted Matrox regarding this, and they can't officially state yes or no for legal reasons i guess, which I understand. So I wanted to as the users. I want to be able to watch the DVD video, full-screen, i guess in a kinda preview mode, with no compression added in. I was able to do this with my old Avermedia TV-phone (although video quality wasn't very good).
I want to make for SURE that it will do what I want it to do, cause all the stores that sell it around here have a 25% restocking fee for returns.

Thanks for any help!!!

[Rick6612]

Hi Cheesehead,

If you're not really interested in capturing/editing video, but only interested in watching DVDs on your computer monitor, you might just consider buying a DVD-ROM drive for your computer. I have a Digital Research 6x DVD-ROM which I bought for $49 before Christmas and it works quite well for playing DVDs on the computer monitor.

I can also feed the DVD video out to my 50" TV through my Matrox Marvel... but, since you have a separate DVD player, this would probably not be a concern for you.

Rick

[Dayspring]

You know what... oddly enough, I do have an internal DVD drive, but I still actually loop the output video from the Dxr-2 (Mpeg decoder) back into the Marvel, because it looks so much better. I hook the S-video from the DVD-out back into the S-video in of the Marvel G200.

It works well, and it looks great. Just hooking in your DVD player lets you have one nice advantage (or having a hardware decoder) over using just an Internal DVD to watch them... you don't suck up so many processor cycles just to decode the video stream. With just hooking it up, you only have the overhead of the Matrox program which seems incredibly small, especially when compared to decoding a steady stream of MPEG-2, which can severely degrade system performance for other tasks...

I like it this way on mine.
Matt

[Michel Carleer]

You can even connect the video out of the Marvel G400 to its video in. This way (and provided you get rid of the MV), you can capture your DVD in MPEG4 format at 352x288 (PAL VCD picture format). That is, if you have a really fast PC. I can do this on a PIII at 600MHz under win98, with only a few dropped frames (5 per 10 min, or so), playing the DVD with WinDVD and capturing with VirtualDub, MPEG4 compression on the fly. I suspect a 700 MHz or higher might well eliminate the dropped frames problem. Tried this just for the fun of it, have not actually captured a full movie yet.
Michka