Digital Trends

Gateway FMC-901X May 11th, 2004 | by Ian Bell

Movie Viewing

For our home movie tests we chose the movies Finding Nemo and The Gladiator. There are two ways to watch a movie. The first is by using the Media Center Menu and the second is by using WinDVD which also comes installed on the system. While using the Media Center DVD player, we were able to get The Gladiator to playback in 5.1 Dolby Digital sound, but Finding Nemo refused to switch over to Dolby Digital forcing us to use Dolby Prologic for the audio side. We decided to try this using WinDVD directly and were able to get both movies to use Dolby Digital without any problems. We are not sure what caused this problem in the Media Center DVD player and hopefully this is something that can be fixed and is not permanent. The worst case could be an incompatibility with the hardware Gateway put in the system. If you find out what causes this, please post in our forums for others to find out. Video quality while watching a DVD movie is just as good as a standalone DVD player using the S-video connector. We can only imagine how well it must look using the DVI input. For videophiles, interested in the only the best video signals, there does not appear to be any progressive scan or HDTV capabilities on this system. If you want to output HDTV resolutions to your television, you will need to purchase ATI's VGA to DVI adapter and install a program called "Powerstrip" in order to get compatible resolutions on your television. Gateway will not support either of these items since they are not packaged with the system. The bright side is that the FMC-901X uses a standard AGP slot for the video card, so you can upgrade the video output should you decide too. The audio quality of this system is pretty fantastic thank to the Creative Labs 7.1 Audigy card.