I’ve got many opinions, some of which are blatantly wrong, others I take just to tease and have an opposing viewto tease friends; not all are serious. Usually, if I’m smirking, I’m just looking for a reaction.

This one is true. Hardware is better than Software, dammit! Don’t get me wrong; some options are only available in software nowadays, and if the hardware is so old that even the magic smoke has gone up in magic smoke, it’s pretty much the only viable alternative.

Here coems the gripe/point: I have a $10 ancient Sigma Designs HollyWood Plus PCI card that does hardware decodign of MPEG2 streams. Practical upshot? Hardware DVD decoding to remove the CPU taxing – mostly. Right now, I’m watching a freebie (Eagles – Hell Freezes over) DVD that I obtained with the rather poor purchase decision of my old RCA DVD player (hey, it was cheap, it was 1997, and I wanted a DVD player, and I still managed to get garbage – feed it a CD-R and it’s time to grab the screwdriver – despite claims on the physical packaging ;)), with under 4% CPU use, vs the 50%-more I get with PowerDVD, WinDVD, et al. It as an SVideo/DTS/Digital output interface (What, me, macrovision?) for output. Sure, the bundled DVD Station doesn’t like different regions, but that’s what DVD Region Killer, and R1211 are for. A DirectShow interface is even available. It even has the ability to hardware downsample my PAL DVDs so I can watch them on my circa-1984 Sears NTSC TV!

Again, explain to me when this option is available, why I’d want to fluster with crashy software, mmm? ;)