The Hardware Incompatibility page.

Various hardware used in playing DVD Titles have incompatibilities with the DVD Playing requirements. On this page i will try to list and define the various cards and their respective problems. No overlay support: As you may know, hardware overlay support is very important for playing DVD Titles, some display adaptors are missing this important feature, these include: Matrox Millenium Matrox Mystique Matrox Millenium II Matrox G100 Cards based on the Permedia 2 chipset (Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro for example) ISA Based Sound Cards: The older sound cards (New cards are PCI) were designed for the ISA mainboard interface. This interface runs at 8mhz compared to the newer 33mhz PCI cards. Using an ISA sound card can give a performance hit, especially if your CPU is borderline when it comes to playing Software DVD. Another thing about ISA cards is, that most of these older cards (not all) only support 44khz sound output, while the DVD standard is 48khz. This requires that the DVD Playing software downsample the audio stream. PowerDVD for example doesn't downsample the audio stream correctly and your sound will be a bit distorted forcing you to lower the sound quality to 24khz which is somewhat bad compared to 48khz. Another incentive for buying a new PCI sound card is that some of them can have 4 or more speaker output for Pro-Logic or even Dolby AC-3 quality sound. Miscellaneous hardware issues: All cards based on the Intel i740 chipset do not support hardware overlay scaling, this causes the image to be truncated when scaled. It is rumored that cards using the Riva TNT chipset have quality issues when hardware scaling is performed. 3com NIC installs a diagnostic utility, The utility disrupts both hardware and software DVD decoding, be warned. Winboost 2000 may cause issues with all software decoders. If you would like to submit a DVD related hardware issue, Mail me.

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