Enabling Hardware Acceleration With Avivo - Finding The Pulldown Switch

Fortunately, ATI's Avivo is designed to work with any hardware decoder that offers a hardware acceleration option. That means if your DVD player came bundled with DVD decoding software, you can enable the DVD video playback quality enhancements simply by clicking the "enable hardware acceleration" in your player's options.

What is not readily apparent is that there is a setting deep within the Catalyst driver that also has to be enabled in order for Avivo's pulldown detection feature to work. By default, the Catalyst driver sets "pulldown detection" to off:

The pulldown detection checkbox, defaulted at "off."

This feature is necessary to correct the jaggies, and if it is left off when playing a DVD title that uses 3:2 pulldown - like pretty much every feature film known to man does - there will be a noticeable visual quality loss. We had no idea that this was something we had to set, and during our first round of testing, we were baffled with the ATI card's inability to deal with pulldown detection.

Once we stumbled upon this option and turned it on, Avivo performed flawlessly. But why is this setting off by default for goodness sake? I can't imagine a reason to leave this off by default, but I will say that this is pretty darned user un-friendly. There are basic users who will probably never venture in to the Catalyst Control Center, and will therefore have no idea that they're missing the enhanced visual quality Avivo's excellent pulldown detection offers.