Inspired by this thread DVD accelerators compared I decided to test some of my graphics cards (in Win98SE) which are supposed to support (partial) MPEG-2 decoding in hardware. These are a ATI Rage Pro and a S3 Savage4, both should be supported by e.g. PowerDVD for decoding DVD video, at least the readme file says so.
But, as hard as I tried - it simply doesn't work. PowerDVD (version 2.5) always tells me that a "Video accelerator" is "not detected", the "enable hardware acceleration" box in the settings panel is greyed out and DVD playback is a bit choppy on my K6-III/400. I tested several drivers for each card, even installed the DVD Player software (3.2.0.1) for the Rage Pro - no success. The ATI DVD Player doesn't even start to play (tells me that either I have no soundcard, overlay not available or not enough video memory). A later version (5.0) works but is even slower than PowerDVD.
I have absolutely no idea what's going on here. Maybe someone here has some hints for me? Thanks in advance.