rjcalnan's Full Review: Sigma Design REALmagic Hollywood Plus PCI Video Ca...
First off, my title states DVD for low end PC's. My PC isn't, well, amybe today it is, but isn't low end. It's a 450PIII, 128MB RAM, 13GB HD, 32MB Video Card, and an A3D Sound Card, with a 440BX motherboard (probably best chipset ever made)
I got a DVD drive about a year ago, 10x Pioneer off a web site, and got it home and the playback from software decoders was awful! It was real choppy, and when the sound got exciting, and the picture had a lot of action on it, my PC would just play it REAL jaggy like. It was terrible. So I went surfing to find out what the heck was wrong. Turns out that I needed a hardware decoder card as well.
So my hunt begins...
Creative DXR3 Decoder Board: hear terrible things about it, plus it was very primative vs. the H+.
Hollywood Plus 98: Heard great things about it, relatively low price, and the only thing I heard that was bad was the installation could be a pain with COM Ports, and Interupts (if you don't understand what those are, don't worry about it). I'm a Home Theater buff as well, and needed a card that had appropriate outputs for my TV and receiver (STR-DE845 and Sony Wega 27")
I bought the H+98 for about $45.00 and got it, installed it (had to disable some unecessary stuff that I didn't know was there) and it worked without a hitch!!! The DVD's played PERFECT on my mid-end PC and I could even do other stuff while they were playing!!! The Digital output to my receiver is great, as is S-video (composite would have been nice, but for $45.00 I'm not complaining!)
All in all, the card worked great, and if you've got an old win95 machine that you can find no use for, get one of these cards, and load up the DVD software, and hook it up to your stereo and TV. I know there are DVD Players out there now for $100, so buying a DVD-Rom and a decoder card might not be the best idea for a low end PC (better yet, donate the low end PC for a tax break, and buy a new one with a DVD-Rom and buy this card separately to go with it!!!)
Fantastic prices with ease & c...(Stock status: N/A)
Sold as 6 UNITS at $4.70 per unit. (1 unit = each.) Rigid. Use on the end of rigid and IMC conduits and other threaded connectors to provide a smooth ...More at Amazon Marketplace
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