Customer Reviews

Creative PC-DVD Encore 12X DVD-ROM with Dxr3 Decoder ( ENCORE12X )

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I just purchased this kit and it has its pluses and minuses. It turned out that I did not need the MPEG decoder card (Dxr3) that came with it to watch DVDs...

First the pluses:

1) Easy installation. Great instructions made it a snap

The Minuses:

1) The kit uses a video loopback. No big deal - you actually run a short video cable from your video card to the Dxr3 card, and then plug your monitor into the Dxr3 card. The problem: a noticable degradation of video quality when passing the video signal to my monitor, through the Dxr3 card. Specifically, text gets thick and fuzzy/blurry. My wife noticed it right away, so I tried going back to getting video directly from the video card and the video quality went back to excellent. Something in the Dxr3 card was degrading the video - bummer. Note: I went to the Creative Lab's newsgroup/bulleting board and this seems to be a common problem - others were posting the same comment.

2) The DVD playing software: I was using it on Windows ME, and I have to say that using it was not straight forward. Cryptic controls like "video overlay" that you need to use to get the video diplay working are not intuitive/explained well. When in full screen mode, I could not figure out (for the life of me) how to shut off the player - there was no "exit" function - how do you shut this thing off!?. Also, the on screen remote had some serious problems - it would turn partially see-through while watching a movie and you couldn't make out hte different buttons. Overall very dissapointing

The best part (for me)I DID NOT NEED the decoder card. It turns out that, if you're computer has a processor that is faster than 700Mhz, your computer can use a "software based decoder" - the computer's main processors are fast enough these days to do it without the assistance of a special card. I ended up removing the card and downloading InterVideo's WinDVD player. It was fantastic! The picture quality was actually better than the picture quality form the Dxr3 card. I watched an entire movie with NO freezing, blockiness or jaggies - perfect DVD quality playback. WinDVD has multichannel support, so if you have Creative's Live! (with digital IO board) sound card, you get 5.1 surround output through the sound card. I have a Cambridge Soundworks DTT22500 speakers - combined with my Live! soundcard and WinDVD, it's an incredible setup.

Why get the Dxr3 card? 1) If you don't have a soundcard with a digital (spdif) output and want digital surround, you'll need the DXr3. 2) If you want to output to your TV, the Dxr3 has an S-video out and an RCA jack video out. 3) If your PC has a slower processor (I'd recomend at least a PIII 600 Mhz) you'll want the Dxr3

Otherwise just get Creative's 12X DVD drive (sold without the Dxr3 card) and buy/download a software based DVD decoder.

As with most things DVD oriented, people are tempted to wait for the next best thing to come out before they buy. I assure you this DVD player is a must buy for anyone considering puting a DVD player into their home PC. The main advantage is the DxR3 Decoder card included with the actual drive itself. This adds into the overall graphical quality of the picture you see. It has a hardware chipset which smoothes out the display textures and colors much better then any software driven computer DVD player. Those with 3d Accelerator cards do not worry, the Decoder card actually plugs into your accelerator card to maintain the ability to play the most demanding games. I have a VooDoo 4500 set and it works fine. A fantastic feature of the decoder card is it's S-Video Out port. This allows you to run a DVD on your PC while displaying it on a full size television set! The picture quality is very respectable and you can select between Letterbox, Pan and Scan, or Standard display. The DVD player comes with an optional adapter to make the S-Video port into an RCA port to make it compatible with almost any televison set. The encoder card also comes with two audio out ports allowing surround sound cards and speaker systems to work wonderfully along side. The user screens to control the DVD are fantastic as well, allowing for easy control through the various features of all DVD's including angels, surround sound settings, and menu searches. You can even fine tune the picture to your personal tastes. I have used at least 15 different DVD's and one DVD ROM (Dragon's Lair)with the Creative DVD player and all worked perfectly. The only drawback to this particular DVD setup is that it does require a free PCI slot inside on your motherboard. Those with add on modems, graphics cards, soundcards and the like may need to get an external device to free up a PCI slot. I have also found the DVD works wonderfully with the new Klipsch THX v2-400 cpmputer speaker system to produce unreal sound reproduction comparable to systems costing over $1000.00! Anyone with a computer in their bedroom or off to the side in a kitchen or living can create a wonderfull mini-home theater and enjoy great DVD reproduction on a full screen. You can even run the DVD display on your TV, play the sound through your TV AND your computer speakers and continue to use your PC in a different manner such as work online, write a paper, play a game, or pay bills all at the same time!! I am very pleased with Creative's system and I have yet to see anything remotely rival it's capibilities. It does come with a 1 year limited warranty.

Although new to the world of DVD-ROM drives, I have had a stand-alone DVD player (region 1) in my living room for some time now and built up a sizable collection of disks. I was particularly interested in adding a drive to my PC for the sole ability to be able to change regions and play DVDs from another country--in this case, region 4 (Australia). I am very happy to report that this kit handles the job extremely well.

The only drawback is that the drive, like nearly all those for sale these days, only allows the user to change regions a maximum of 5 times before it becomes permanently region locked. For me, this was not a problem, since this is what I intended to do with it anyway, but it could be something others might want to consider.

The DxR3 decoder card--IMHO--is worth its weight in gold, delivering frame rates as smooth as my living room player, as well as excellent color and sound. And my PC is just slightly above min requirements with a Celeron 466 (recommended PII 400). I was truly impressed. But possibly *the* best feature of the decoder card is its ability to output the signal to a regular television via an S-Video cable (optional), or the S-Video-to-RCA plug included in the kit. Not only can I watch my region 4 disks on my computer monitor, but the included software allows me to output the signal as "Force to NTSC", which basically means my region 4 PAL format DVD disks play absolutely perfectly on my standard NTSC television screen, with no loss of signal or frame stutter!

The setup and installation presented no problem, although I found the enclosed instructions slightly lacking. There was no mention of using the video loopback cable with your existing graphics card, and the software installation instructions were more than a little vague. Computer savvy users will have no trouble figuring it out, but beginners might find it a little intimidating.

In closing, I can recommend this DVD-ROM kit to computer users who not only want DVD-ROM capabilities in their home PC, but to anyone who is thinking of adding a different region drive to their existing setup.

I purchased this drive in December of 2000. Since the software did not work with my Windows 2000 operating system, I downloaded the beta driver for the DXR3 board. It work somewhat fine, but it caused several problems with other drivers on my system. Uninstalling the driver's did not work and after two weeks and a dozen phone calls to Creative Labs, I finally just reinstalled Windows from scratch. The drive works fine now, but the DXR3 board is sitting on the shelf and hasn't been used since. After nine months, there's still no support for Windows 2000 and I feel like I've been ripped off... Creative Labs has had more then enough time to come up with something for Windows 2000 users. The included software is decent, but I found other programs that are much better. I'd give it 5 stars if the drivers were usable.

For the uninitiated, the DXR3 Decoder card is really the Creative version of the excellent Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus MPEG2 decoder card, which has been around for quite some time.

Absolutely fabulous video quality. I do have a couple of other home DVD players (a Toshiba SD-2108 & a nice region-free SD-1200 that I bought in Asia), but sometimes it's really nice to kick back in my study area and watch a movie also. Video quality and ease-of-use wise, the DXR3 card is still noticeably superior to the quality you get out of DVD players bundled with the most recent GeForce2-based accelerator cards.

There is an easy solution to the max 5 times change for the DVD Region. Simply go to: www.visualdomain.net

Erwin van den Berg has an excellent little utility called Remote Selector which allows you to work around the silly DVD region coding nonsense the movie studios came up with.

Although I got a great deal by using coupon codes ..., I am sorry to say that it works terribly under Windows 2000. I understand that this has been on the market for about a year, yet the drivers for Windows 2000 are still in beta. The audio skips and I am unable to use the software unless I am logged in as Administrator.

It turns out that Creative doesn't have supported Windows 2000 drivers for this product. After several hours of troubleshooting and effort getting it to work, I finally contacted Creative to see if they could be any help. They told me they don't yet support Windows 2000 (though W2K's been available now for almost a year), and that they can't help. I asked what to do next, and they said to return it to the place I purchased it.

Do yourself a favor and don't buy this product...

This worked fine in my old computer (AMD K6 450MHz, built-in sound/video on motherboard, Win98SE), but was horrible in my new box (AMD Athlon 900MHz, Voodoo 3 video, Win98SE). Wouldn't play DVDs using any software (PC-DVD, WinDVD, PowerDVD, Windows DVD Player). PC-DVD and WinDVD both locked up. PowerDVD decided it wouldn't play copyrighted DVDs. Windows DVD Player apparently didn't recognize the Dxr3 decoder card, because it kept saying the player wasn't properly configured and I couldn't play DVDs without a decoder. Tech support was prompt but not very helpful. I did at least a half-dozen different things they suggested and the problem was never solved. I finally replaced it (and my CD-RW, which was okay) with an LG Electronics GCC-4120B CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive, which came bundled with PowerDVD; the new drive has worked great.

For some reason I have always thought that a Creative product was a good thing. I consider that to be dead wrong now. The box boasts Windows 2000 compatability, but thats a joke. I was able to get it to work in Win2k, after MUCH tweaking, and divine intervention I think. When I reformatted this weekend though, nothing I do will get it to work properly. Creative is notorious for releasing massive bloatware with their products, and this is no exception (although it is not as bad as their Live! products). I can't believe this thing cost (dollar amount), when a (dollar amount) generic DVD player will work better, if you have a decent processor and video card the "extras" don't do much at all. Stupid me for buying this, don't make that mistake. (...)

Looks great and had no troubles after I downloaded and installed the new Win2K drivers.