Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus rocks!
Written: Jan 19 '01 (Updated Jan 22 '01)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Excellent image quality, great value
Cons: Driver installation can be difficult
The Bottom Line: If you have a low-end system with a DVD drive or need the TV-out, buy this card! Just remember to get updated drivers - the ones included aren't very good.
|
|
|
| busero's Full Review: Sigma Design REALmagic Hollywood Plus PCI Video Ca... |
The Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus is a PCI card that can decode and display MPEG video in two ways: through a VGA overlay system, or through the card's S-Video/Composite TV-out.
The overlay system works like this: instead of plugging your monitor directly into your video card, you plug it into the H+. Then using a passthrough cable, you connect your video card to the H+. I thought immediately that I would get an inferior picture with this, but I didn't notice any difference in quality at all. This is a good thing!
But looking at the card, one may think, "Why would I need such a device?" It's very simple - you might not. If you have a computer fast enough to decode DVD video through a software decoder (like PowerDVD), there are only a couple minor things you may want to do with the H+. For one thing, there's a wonderful TV-out port on the back of the card. If you're tired of squinting at your 15" monitor, you can hook this sucker up to a 32" TV (assuming you have a cable that can reach that far :). "Wait! I have a TV-out on the back of my video card!" Well, if you can live with its cruddy quality - well, that's your business. I can't. The H+ delivers video through the TV-out with quality that rivals a normal standalone player. Yeah, it'll never look as good as an Apex or Sony standalone player, but it's still excellent. Another thing that this card can do is free up a lot of resources compared to playing DVDs through a software decoder. This isn't really a big deal if you've got a Pentium 3 or faster.
If you've got a relatively low-end system (less than 300 mhz), this thing is a godsend. In addition to all the things I described above, there is one huge advantage - videos won't skip anymore! NO SKIPPING! None! Playback is silky smooth.
If you already own the card and video is still skipping, there are a couple things you can do: enable DMA through the System applet in the Control Panel, and if your DVD drive is IDE, set it as master (slave causes nothing but problems and slowness).
After writing all these wonderful things about the H+, I almost hate to do this, but I must.
Installation sucks. I've installed a lot of cards, and this is up there in terms of installation difficulty.
I plugged in the card into my last empty PCI slot, connected up the video with the included VGA passthrough cable, and powered on my PC. Windows then detected the device and asked for drivers, just as it should have. Good so far. I put in the included 3 1/2" diskette let it copy the drivers, then installed the applications from another included diskette. After running the DVD station, the packaged DVD software, I'm promptly greeted with an error message: "Error loading driver, driver may be in use". Crud. I thought that this could be because I forgot to reboot after installing the drivers, so I did that. Ran the DVD station again, and got the same error. Here's where the fun begins - I spent quite a bit of time changing around the order and removing unnecessary PCI cards (as suggested in the readme), but the same error kept coming up. I even bothered to reinstall Windows. Same problem. I checked the website and countless FAQs on the net, and they basically suggested the same thing.
I finally checked Google for any updated drivers (which, by the way, wasn't suggested in the readme), since they're pretty much hidden from Sigma Design's site, and found a newer set. Hey, it finally worked! It ran through the automatic color calibration and border adjustment, and everything after was DVD bliss.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 30
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
busero
|
|
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.