PowerDVD for Linux: User's Guide
<<< Previous		Next >>>

Chapter 2. System Requirements

The quality of DVD playback with PowerDVD depends greatly on the hardware on which it is being used. For best results we recommend the following.

Table 2-1. Recommended Hardware

CPU	Celeron 466MHz or better
RAM	256MB or greater
Video card	NVidia GeForce FX/GeForce2 MX/GeForce2 Go/GeForce4 MX, ATI Radeon 9000/9200/9000M/9200M, Intel i810/i815/i830/855G/865G
Sound card	Any card supported by Turbolinux FUJI
DVD drive	DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+RW (IEEE1394, USB2.0, ATAPI, SCSI)

Only cards actually verified by CyberLink Incorporated are noted in the list above however, many other cards do in fact work as well. That said, some PowerDVD operations are hardware-dependent, and therefore correct operation on all hardware cannot be guaranteed. Further, playback from devices with low data transfer rates (such as USB 1.1 external disk drives) is known to suffer from poor video quality (e.g., dropped frames).

PowerDVD requires the presence of a software extension to xorg(the software on which the Linux desktop is built) called XVideo, and therefore also requires a video card capable of supporting XVideo. With this functionality, even older-model hardware is capable of high quality video playback. Unfortunately XVideo is not supported by all video cards. You can confirm whether or not your card has support for the XVideo extension by using the "xvinfo" command.

To run the xvinfo command, you must first start a terminal emulator. Click on the Menu icon and then choose [Program] -> [System] -> [Konsole] .

At the terminal emulator command prompt, type "xvinfo" and press [Enter]. If the output looks like that displayed below, then your card has support for the XVideo extension.

$ xvinfo
X-Video Extension version 2.2
screen #0
  Adaptor #0: "Matrox G-Series Backend Scaler"
    number of ports: 1
    port base: 61
    operations supported: PutImage
    supported visuals:
      depth 24, visualID 0x23
      depth 24, visualID 0x24
      depth 24, visualID 0x25
      ...

However, if the output resembles the following, your card does not have support for the XVideo extension.

$ xvinfo
X-Video Extension version 2.2
screen #0
 no adapters present

Those cards which presently lack support for the XVideo extension cannot be used with PowerDVD. Further, there are some cases in which, despite the presence of XVideo extension support, a given card cannot be used with PowerDVD.