Encore 6X - Mikael Hagén - Last updated December 20, 1999

Performance:The Dxr3 Mpeg2 decoder card

Due to the passthrough cable, a slight image degradation may be noticeable when you're not watching DVD movies, but at the highest resolution my 17 inch monitor can handle (1152x864 at 85 Hz) I didn't notice any image degradation. However, I've seen complaints in the newsgroups from people using 21 inch monitors that the degradation is quite severe, but when watching a DVD movie it has no effect. If you think this is a problem you can of course disconnect the passthrough cable when you are not watching a DVD movie and it isn't that much of a hassle. If you use a TV to display the DVD movie you don't even need to use the pass-through cable.  Note that It's only the movie that can be displayed on the TV and not windows apps.

To play a DVD movie you use Creative's PC-DVD player, which has an easy to use interface and supports several functions. You'll find all the basic functions any VCR has (except record of course). This includes fast forward, fast rewind, increase volume, decrease volume, stop, pause, play, eject, mute, slow motion forward and slow motion backward. In addition to these, the player supports typical DVD functions like search time, next chapter, previous chapter, bookmark (the player remember the bookmarks you set for each movie), parental control, repeat chapter (play the chapter over and over again), repeat A-B (you select a start and stop point and the player repeats that section), step forward button to advance the video a frame at a time (you can't do the reverse) and finally several menu buttons for fast and easy access to the various menus the DVD include like choosing different audio tracks, subtitles, theatrical trailer etc. You can also access most of the above from a tear down menu you get if you right click on the display window. The keyboard can also be used to access most features so you don't need to display the PC-DVD player in the middle of a movie when you want to pause the movie, increase the sound or skip to the next track. This is especially convenient if you use a TV since the PC-DVD player can only be displayed on the monitor.

The player also has configuration options where you can select if you want to display the movie on a TV or monitor (can't display on both at the same time) and whether you want to use the AC-3 out or use the stereo/Dolby surround out. I think this is the best player I've seen so far. The only issue is that the player can crash if you mess around with the different configuration options a lot, but it never happened during normal use. Another "bug" that I actually liked was that the "fast forward/backward" command can be set to play the movie from 2x-6x plays the movie much faster than those number indicates. 2x is more 4x and 6x should really be called 150x.

You can also use the DVD player to play Video CDs but then you'll only have the traditional VHS player functions.

The only thing missing is a remote control (hardware) but there is remote controls available to the PC. One that has been recommended on the newsgroup is X10's Mouse Remote, which cost $25. You can check out their site for the details. I have not tried it but it seems like a great product and is not just limited to your PC.

Performance and image quality

So how does the player perform when watching DVD movies? The playback is constantly smooth at 30 fps and with low CPU usage (about 10% on my Celeron 300A o/c to 450), giving you more-than-enough enough CPU power to do other things while watching a movie. When I first did the testing for this review I had tried several software DVD players (including PowerDVD 1.5 and Zoran's SoftDVD bundled with the MX300) and they were only useful when I had my CPU clocked to 450 MHz and even then they take 100% of the CPU time. The framerate was not completely smooth with either SoftDVD or PowerDVD but I can't say I noticed any significant framerate drops.

That has definitely changed over the past few months with the latest versions of PowerDVD and WinDVD significantly improving performance.  Both of these software players (WinDVD OEM only) offer AC-3 downmixing to 4-speakers with several sound chips and cards.   The typical close proximity of the listener for PC DVD playback allows this center channel virtualization to be effective and there is a virtual Dolby certification process to ensure quality of the down mixing. How effective is down mixing compared to true 5.1 decoding?   First, how much the 4 speaker downmixing option improves your audio experience will as always depend on the movie, but in almost every action movie I've played the improvements over stereo and Dolby Surround are quite significant.  In my opinion, its more of a difference than the visual improvement compared to VHS.  Our testing is that is 4-speaker down-mixing of DD 5.1 using WinDVD, PowerDVD 2.5 or Dxr3 (only with Live) is much better than Dolby Prologic but not as good as on hardware decoder.  It's not the phantom center channel that's the problem, at  least not when you have the two front satellites not too far away from each other.  In terms of center what is lost with downmixing is the ability to seperately adjust center channel volume and perhaps delay.  In terms of quality we find  that it's more the front - rear transition that's much more effective and seamless when using a hardware decoder.   The jury is also still out on just how effectively different software DVD players handle mixing the LFE channel.     Having said all of that, many software DVD players now support the SPDIF out on a variety of sound cards.  This means that you can use a software DVD player and get full AC-3 5.1 hardware support.   One feature that was added to the Dxr3 with a driver update was DTS pass-out which is a feature thats not found on most software DVD players at this point in time ( its in an OEM version of WinDVD and WinDVD 2000 will support DTS).  You cannot downmix DTS audio but since DTS is an optional standard all  DTS DVDs must  have some other format, usually either Dolby Digital or PCM track which are the two standard formats.  All DTS DVDs   are also available seperately in Dolby Digital 5.1 (or 5.0 - e.g. Waterworld) formats.    

When it comes to audio quality I would recommend that you always select the AC-3/DD 5.1 track if it's available. The sound quality is often much better than the stereo or Dolby Surround tracks that may also be available even if you use a Dolby Prologic player or have a normal stereo soundcard. If you have a Live they you can take advantage of a couple special features on the Dxr3.  First, the Dxr3 offers 4 speaker downmixing when used with a Sound Blaster Live making that combination  your only current choice if you want a hardware DVD decoder and 4 speaker AC3 downmixing at the same time!  Best of all  the results are at least as good as with four speaker downmixing on any of the soft DVD players.  The other handy feature that the Dxr3 offers if you have a Sound Blaster Live is AC-3 pass-thru.  This will pass the AC-3 signal from the Dxr3 right to the Sound Blaster Live without using an external SPDIF COAX connection and then pass that signal thru to the SPDIF COAX out on your Live (various options for COAX out).  This is handy for reducing connections or if you have a version of the Live with no digital inputs  as   instead of using the Dxr3 SPDIF out to physically connect to the Live SPDIF in you just use the Live SPDIF out.  There is more to this feature than just convenience.    If you are using a version of the Sound Blaster Live with Optical out capability and your AC-3 decoder only accepts Optical in, the Live (via the LiveDrive II or Optical I/O card 2) supports converting the signal from COAX to optical.  The actual decoding is still happening externally via your AC-3/DTS amp or speakers such as Creative's DTT 5.1.

As noted, for the ultimate experience you will need a Dolby Digital 5.1 system or perhaps one that also does DTS audio. Even the inexpensive DTT 5.1 system I used blows Dolby Surround  out of the water and  is also better than 4 speaker downmixing when it comes to the ability to set volume on the center channel and with respect to front to rear transition.  For more about this check out my review of the Cambridge SoundWorks' Desktop Theater DDTT 2500 or my review of Videologic's Digitheatre system.   However, the bottom line if you have a sound card with digital out that's supported by a high quality software DVD player there is little, if anything, to do with audio to make you go with a hardware decoder like the Dxr3 instead of a software decoder like WinDVD or PowerDVD.

So what about visuals?  The only issue with the image quality I found with the Dxr3 is that the subtitles don't look very good on either a Monitor or TV.   However, this is the same with all software DVD players I tested so maybe this is a limitation with the overlay technique (at least using a TNT) used for monitor display or a problem with DVDs. Except for subtitles the image quality is excellent on the TV (similar to the Dxr2 and standalone DVD players) and unlike the Dxr2 the image quality is now also perfect on the monitor. The improvement in image quality from the Dxr2 on a monitor is significant especially when it comes to the colour saturation. However, it's no significant difference compared to the best software DVD players. If you already have a DVD drive and are not happy with a software DVD player you could order just the Dxr3 from Creative's website for $130. This could also be a good choice for those owning a Dxr2 card and watch movies on their monitor. If you have a powerful CPU and think a software DVD player will do you can just order the DVD-drive from Creative's website for $150.

Reading the newsgroup, I found out that there are a few problems with the shipping drivers. The most severe is that it refuses to play the last chapter on Columbia Tristar movies. This doesn't, according to newsgroup posts,  just include credits but also the end scenes for several movies like Starship Troopers, The Professional and Godzilla. This is of course totally unacceptable. Another common complaint is that the movie isn't displayed correctly on a PAL TV. Testing this myself I found out that the Dxr3 TV-out places the picture too close to the top. When watching a widescreen movie on a non-widescreen TV it was only slightly annoying that the picture wasn't centered. However, I've read that people using a widescreen TV experience a picture that is significantly squeezed when watching widescreen movies and for pan&scan movies the top is chopped off. In the updated drivers just released on Creative's site the PAL and last chapter issue is both solved. I was not able to test this since I had to return the kit but several posts has confirmed that the drivers works well. In this update you will also get drivers for NT4. The drivers can be downloaded from

• U.S. Site
  http://support.soundblaster.com/files/download.asp
• Asian Site
  www.creative-ASIA.com/support/drivers/download.asp
• European Site
  http://www.cle.creaf.com/techknow/tech/ftp/ftpnew.asp

The only remaining common complaint are no option to change region code. This is of course not something Creative will fix since it's Hollywood that demands this feature to be disabled. However as mentioned on page 2 there is a crack available for those wanting to play another region than where they live.

Now when Creative drivers works great there is not much reason to use any other drivers but if you end up finding some issue with the new drivers or for some other reason want to you can instead use Sigma's drivers for the Hollywood Plus. The reason this works is that the Dxr3 card is basically a HollyWood Plus card relabeled by Creative. However, Creative did make some slight modifications, so the drivers won't work perfectly and you will lose the option for 4 speaker downmixing and AC3 pass-thru (which only matter if you have a Sound Blaster Live) .  If you follow the instructions on http://www.multimania.com/hollywoodplus/uk.htm you should be able to get them to work. If you can't get it to work make sure you install the player software on the 1.5 and not the 1.6 drivers (you can upgrade the drivers after you installed the player software). Also make sure that you connected the loopback cable during installation. To switch between TV and monitor out you need to open the options dialog box, chose settings - configuration - advanced - video output and then finally chose the VGA or TV-out option. You must launch all DVD movies from the ZoneSelector to get this to work. I tried it and everything works for me under Windows 95. You can also use the Hollywood Plus NT4 drivers under NT4 but then I wasn't able to get AC-3 or TV-out to work.

Creative's player won't work if you use these drivers so you need to use the HollyWood player that works a bit differently, but you'll still have access to all the important functions of Creative players and a few more configuration options. There is a few more configuration options with these drivers and the software also supports screen capture if the movie supports it. Using the ZoneSelector you can disable macrovision so it should work with all movies. 

The strong points of the Encore 6X kit are the good DVD/CD drive, easy to use and full featured DVD player, good quality four speaker downmixing when used in combination with a Sound Blaster Live, the MPEG2 card's outstanding performance and excellent image quality on both a TV and the monitor. Even if you have a powerful CPU the Dxr3 card offers guaranteed smooth framerate , AC-3 and TV out something that can be more difficult  to get to work well with a software DVD player and several of the software DVD players don't work under NT4 and even when they do some soundcards that supports AC-3 out under Windows 95/98 don't under NT4.  Another important advantage is that Creative currently offers excellent support in the dvd.encore group on their newsserver (news.soundblaster.com) much better than my experience calling tech support at any company. The only weak points are that it takes a PCI slot and you need to use the mouse or keyboard to control it since there is no remote control included. As said above you can buy X10's Mouse Remote to get that functionality for $25.

Overall Performance: 95/100

Price/Performance Ratio:

With a suggested list price of $250 and street prices as low as $200 the Encore 6X kit is an inexpensive way for anyone that want to experience DVD, and together with a DD 5.1 system like Creative's Desktop Theater DTT2500 or Videologic's DigitTheatre you will have the best movie experience possible in your home. It's not much cheaper than the cheapest stand alone player, about $300 in US, but for those wanting to watch movies on their monitor or TV close by  the $100 saved together with the advantage of using the drive as a CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drive the kit offers a lot for your money.
The DVD drive and Dxr3 can also be bought separately from Creative's web site for $150 and $130 respectively.

score: 95/100

Summary:

By including the 6X DVD and the Dxr3 decoder card in one single package for only $250 USD (ESP) Creative Labs has certainly succeeded in putting together a great DVD kit.

Overall score: 95/100 

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