Does video card matter for watching DVD?

im planning to get a laptop to watch DVDs. does the video card give high quality of DVDs picture? in other words, does a good video card (like NVIDIA or that kinds of video card) give better picture? it's only for DVD-watching, not for games. thanks.|||no. those NVIDIA video card is only for games.. for DVD, it adds no value...........|||Quiet frankly, no. If it's onboard video it'll matter a little, see the onboard video will use a lot of the CPU power, while a independant video card will do all the processing and leave the CPU pretty much idle.



In terms of what kind of video card you need, a cheap video card will do the job for just plain old DVD watching. Some say ATI has a better IQ than Nvidia ( Image Quality) , but in my own personal experiance, Nvidia cards run cooler, a little cheaper and i like their drivers better.



It's all up to you which brand you choose, but yes any video card will do for DVD watching.|||All video cards play DVDs quite well now, but you're probably better off with an nVidia or ATI card.



You also want 3D support:



Most modern Operating Systems are moving toward OpenGL or DirectX support for rendering the GUI. So I would recommend a 3D graphics card, they are not just for games any more.



If you want to run Windows Vista or Mac OS X, then you will need 3D graphics support!



( That doesn't read well: visit this site to findout why: http://www.rixstep.com/1/20060325,00.sht… )



I would personally make sure a new laptop contained an ATI or nVidia 3D graphics card.



( Oh, no! That doesn't read right either: http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/… )



How DVDs play on a laptop:



Why do I have special hardware for displaying video?



Most computers display graphics in the RGB color space, while a DVD contains video encoded in the MPEG codecs, which store video frames in the YCbCr color space family.



The quality of the picture is down to the encoding of the video (on the DVD etc) and not the video card. But the result you get on the screen is down to the video cards ability to hardware scale the output image to full-screen size and ability to display output as an overlay in the YCdCr color space.



Why do I want support for this?



Real-time YCbCr to RGB conversion can be quite slow, but the main problem with displaying video on a computer screen in RGB format, is the resolution (screen size in pixels) of modern high resolution displays, and how long it takes to modify and then transfer a full frame of the screen to the video hardware (anything over 640x480 can be considered large).



In order to display a 1440 x 900 32bit color video at 30 frames per second in RGB would require 151Mb of data per second to be transfered to your graphics card! Which is too much data to send in real-time.



Fortunately the bandwidth required for playing DVDs is much smaller than this, and small enough to easily transfer directly to your graphics card in YCbCr format.



So if your video hardware supports YCbCr (YUV overlays) all you need to do is transfer the YCbCr data and let the hardware sort it out rather than convert plus send the large RGB format data.|||ofcourse, but no very much. todays all of VGA s are able to play movies and pictures.