HW DVD Decoders

[mc68k]

Does any DVD program (past or present) utilize hardware DVD decoding?

every player seems to be software only these days. is there any real difference?

thanks

[vniow]

Hardware used to be the only you could watch a DVD on your computer, sometimes it was integrated within the video card like some of ATI's models.

Since then, CPUs have gotten fast and powerful enough for software to do all the decoding with about the same quality.

Hardware decoding still provides better quality, but it's marginal and not worth the cost when software can do it 99.9% as good.

[mc68k]

i have an ATI Rage 128 w/decoder daughtercard, but I want to know if anything utilizes the HW so as if I can tell a difference against SW

(or personal experience/opinion)

my home computer has a 50MHz system bus, so i need all the power i can get

[al256]

Originally posted by mc68k
Does any DVD program (past or present) utilize hardware DVD decoding?

The old powerbooks (pre-2000 aka wallstreet,mainstreet, and lombard) use to use PCMCIA MPEG-2 decoder cards. The cards probley will never work with OS X but do work with OS 9. So the old DVD player 2.x in OS 9 could use hardware decoders. Hope that helps some.

[mc68k]

Originally posted by al256
So the old DVD player 2.x in OS 9 could use hardware decoders. Hope that helps some. Helped alot. I looked at Apple's KBase and found that Apple DVD Player 1.x is HW decoding and anything thereafter is software only.

looks like i found my answer. thanks everyone. :)