MJR wrote:
Video cards that play DVDs? Actually the card? Not use a program? I think you get the idea.
Well - maybe I've been labouring under a misapprehension all this time, but I've seen advertised some cards, such as this one: "GeForce2 MX400 AGP 64MB Graphics Accelerator - (blah, blah) Allows full-screen, full-frame DVD playback." Or there's this: "nVIDIA TNT2 M64 Graphic Accelerators - (blah, blah again) DVD playback using Power DVDXP4.0 with RCA composite and S-VHS outputs"
I don't know whether quoting those two makes it any clearer why I've been asking my question, or whether I'm barking up some sort of a wrong tree. I assumed that proper DVD decoding (whatever that might be) needed more power than a CPU could give and so some sort of purpose-made hardware did the decoding.
But why would a card's spec specifically talk about allowing full-screen DVD playback if the type of card had no bearing on this????
From http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html -- "If you can't get an answer, please don't take it personally that we don't feel we can help you. Soemtimes the members of the asked group may simply not know the answer. No response is not the same as being ignored"
Thanks for the reference - I'll go and find it next time I'm connected.
Clearly, though, there have been (infinitely) more answers since I made my comment than before (ratio = 6:0) so I'm not sure that the sentence you quoted above explains why I didn't get a response before.
Cheers,
Gerald.