Good, cheap, does the job
Written: Jul 16 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Really, it works; good cheap DVD; works with low end PCs
Cons: Can be quirky on Win2k
The Bottom Line: If you are playing DVD Video on your computer, you'll get a good performance boost from the Hollywood Plus.
|
|
|
| blevwal's Full Review: Sigma Design REALmagic Hollywood Plus PCI Video Ca... |
The Hollywood Plus is something most people might not think they need. You may buy a DVD drive that comes with a software decoder (just the drive and software), but some DVD drives come with relabeled versions of this card included.
Essentially, the Hollywood Plus does all the heavy lifting for your CPU and graphics card in decoding and presenting DVD movies. A lower end computer (I have a 500 MHz K6-2 based machine) with a software decoder can't do much else at the same time. With a Hollywood Plus, you can.
If you're a person living a small place or a gear geek like myself, you can use it easily as a DVD player for your TV, good quality picture and you can use your PC at the same time, bsides that it does Dolby Digital audio streamout...cool...huh?! Buy the remote control for more fun, but it doesn't seem to always work exactly right, especially when starting the program and starting the DVD playing.
Installing the Hollywood Plus was a bit tricky on my machine; I had a Matrox G400 video card and the Matrox software DVD player installed already. On Win ME, they seemed to tolerate each other, but on Win 2000, nothing worked...once I reprepped the machine and didn't install the Matrox software, the Hollywood Plus worked great a champ. No dice yet on Windows XP, at least on beta 2
Look for the OEM version of the card...much better pricing.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 50
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
blevwal
|
|
Location: Minnesota
Reviews written: 12
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
Just another regular guy with some strong opinions
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.