XPS M1530, 8600GT and PureVideo (HD)

So, are there any plain-spoken sites that explain exactly what my options are for GPU acceleration of video decoding operations?

When I last looked into this a couple of years ago, even the brightest minds on avsforum couldn't really figure out what you -needed- in order to enjoy GPU-assisted video decode nor how to actually *know* that it's working. Now I have a shiny new GeForce 8xxx series card that supports all the hot video features, and once again, I'm struggling to figure out how drivers, codecs, players and other things fit together to take advantage of this fancy hardware-assisted features on my XPS 1530.

If I pop a DVD into the thing and Windows Media Center or Windows Media Player start playing it, is there any GPU involvement? Any way to check?

What if I play some divx-encoded or h264-encoded file in WMP? Or say I play it in VLC Player? Or something else?

Are drivers involved? What if I'm using one of the 64-bit drivers from laptopvideo2go? Does that enable (or disable) GPU assist? Any way to be sure? Does anyone actually know?

And do the specific codecs matter at all? If so, how can I tell?

I'm at a huge loss about this. I'm hoping someone can help me out. I'm asking specifically in the context of M1530 owners. My situation, I have a ton of HD-DVD titles which obviously are obsolete but I'm going to rip 'em and strip 'em and have my M1530 send them to my projector over 1080p HDMI. They play well enough (the T8300 seems to have plenty of muscle) but I don't think the 8600GT is involved in the slightest just by looking at the CPU graphs.

 

im remember ATI released a special encoding program for their GPUs, its a little faster(usage shared b/w CPU and GPU), but not that much of a difference (~10-20%)

look at USB sticks?

http://www.everythingusb.com/ads_instant_video_to-go_12252.html

to check: stick your hand onto your graphics card and see if theres a difference in temperature

use a program to check the GPU's temp

 

Paper, I'm referring to nVidia's PureVideo and specifically its focus on hardware decoding, not encoding.

 

well, the purevideo is working but the cpu does the brunt of the work.

 

How do you know? How did you enable it and what players, codecs and drivers were you using when you got it working?

 

I'm interested in knowing this, too.

Even on the M133O's lowly 8400M GS, if you install the latest drivers from Dell, you'll see a PureVideo tab in the nVidia Control Panel.

nVidia says PureVideo is a combination of hardware and the codec you use; both are needed, since the software codec tells the hardware to decode.