Oh lord, I remember this card well! It got tons of publicity for being one of the earliest DOS MPEG cards that were designed to give games full FMV capabilities on old machines like a 386. Return to ZORK supported it for example. They're a combo of video and sound card - they were touted as a "full multimedia solution" after all. Here's a topic with some more info:

Re: ReelMagic MPEG Decoder running Return to Zork

The tech certainly wasn't long lived - CPUs became powerful enough to handle MPEG video on the fly and even games such as Under A Killing Moon ran on a 386 without a special (and expensive card) needed so perhaps the card came too late? Besides Zork, I can't immediately think of other games supporting it.

But, that card looks way smaller than the ones I recall seeing - those were huge and ISA. This one has the Real Magic chip so I assume it's a more recent version. Or maybe it's a 2D card which licensed the Real Magic technology hence the chip?

Real Magic also made VCD and DVD decoding cards. Perhaps one of those?

yawetaG wrote:

Real Magic also made VCD and DVD decoding cards. Perhaps one of those?

What boggles my mind is that no system with a PCI port would require anything of the kind? My understanding was that this was a hardware VGA capture card maybe, receiving VGA input and encoding it as MPEG-1 on the fly?

yawetaG wrote:

Real Magic also made VCD and DVD decoding cards. Perhaps one of those?

Most PCI systems can decode MPEG1 imho, but DVD is a bit beefier. Production date of 1997 seems to fit the timeframe.

Hi all, first post here!

If I remember correctly, these cards were DVD decoders and were often sold along with (or perhaps bundled with) the earliest DVD ROM drives.

graffias79 wrote:

Hi all, first post here!

If I remember correctly, these cards were DVD decoders and were often sold along with (or perhaps bundled with) the earliest DVD ROM drives.

Welcome aboard! 😁
Feel free to hang around and share your invaluable knowledge with us 😀
Become part of the knowledge collective, resistance is futile 😁

Can't find pictures from reliable source but the sellers on recycledgoods, ebay and amazon have similar cards for sale under the name "Netstream II", which is designed for decoding MPEG-I video from online streaming. Kinda weird for 1997: your CPU was powerful enough to decode MPEG-I and what you really needed was faster internet.

This looks familiar to what I had in collage but I don't think it is exactly but that was a long time ago. My first DVD player was my computer with a Real Magic Hollywood Plus and a DVD drive. I had a K6-II 450 or 500 then which was no where near powerful to decode DVD MPEG2 video. Even though the card and DVD drive cost $150 or so, it was still cheaper than a home player. There was a VGA passtrough like a Voodoo1/2 card but that might have been like a Y cable. It also had an A/V output for TVs. That is how I watched my first DVDs (The Fifth Element was one of them, awesome movie!).

So this card looks similar but I can't say for sure. I'd say it is interesting enough to get it if you are ok buying something for $15 that you may not be able to use but could turn a profit selling it on ebay...maybe.

Just google around and see what you can find

Oh, and regarding timing of CPU power and the ability to decode DVD video without such a card does put it closer to the year 2000 (which is when I had this setup) but it would have been expensive. K6-2/K6-3 were affordable but not powerful enough. Pentium III 700-ish was out around 2000 but they were expensive being so new. 700MHz was just about the minimum if I remember correctly but it was still quite intensive to decode DVD video. Video cards that could assist decoding DVDs are still a few years off.

I did some quick searching. It is not a Hollywood Plus.
I cannot find any other information other than its a 'PCI video card'. I highly doubt it is a grapics card.

If it was me, I'd save my $15. If it was a Hollywood Plus, I'd go for it.

This page (about 3/4th through the page) identifies said card as a very old Real Magic DVD decoder card: Hollywood 2. Drivers only exist for Windows 95-98.

GiSWiG wrote:

This looks familiar to what I had in collage but I don't think it is exactly but that was a long time ago. My first DVD player was my computer with a Real Magic Hollywood Plus and a DVD drive. I had a K6-II 450 or 500 then which was no where near powerful to decode DVD MPEG2 video. Even though the card and DVD drive cost $150 or so, it was still cheaper than a home player. There was a VGA passtrough like a Voodoo1/2 card but that might have been like a Y cable. It also had an A/V output for TVs. That is how I watched my first DVDs (The Fifth Element was one of them, awesome movie!).

So this card looks similar but I can't say for sure. I'd say it is interesting enough to get it if you are ok buying something for $15 that you may not be able to use but could turn a profit selling it on ebay...maybe.

Just google around and see what you can find

Really, your K6-II 500 had trouble decoding? My PIII450 had no trouble decoding at all without extra hardware - I didn't realize the PIII was that much more powerful than the K6-II.

red_avatar wrote:

GiSWiG wrote:

This looks familiar to what I had in collage but I don't think it is exactly but that was a long time ago. My first DVD player was my computer with a Real Magic Hollywood Plus and a DVD drive. I had a K6-II 450 or 500 then which was no where near powerful to decode DVD MPEG2 video. Even though the card and DVD drive cost $150 or so, it was still cheaper than a home player. There was a VGA passtrough like a Voodoo1/2 card but that might have been like a Y cable. It also had an A/V output for TVs. That is how I watched my first DVDs (The Fifth Element was one of them, awesome movie!).

So this card looks similar but I can't say for sure. I'd say it is interesting enough to get it if you are ok buying something for $15 that you may not be able to use but could turn a profit selling it on ebay...maybe.

Just google around and see what you can find

Really, your K6-II 500 had trouble decoding? My PIII450 had no trouble decoding at all without extra hardware - I didn't realize the PIII was that much more powerful than the K6-II.

I can attest to that, I also had a K6-2 and back in the day it simply could not play DVD without the RealMagic Hollywood card. My PIII back then, which was my first PC with a DVD drive, was a much faster 600/650MHz so could playback unaided. I actually just tested that very same PIII system and it uses about 60-70% CPU to playback DVD.

The poor old K6-2 couldn't even handle DivX/XviD playback, which is one of the reasons I ended up retiring it in the early 2000s 🤣.

1997 was still the original Pentium days, and this card was required for DVD playback. I had something like this I bought in a Creative bundle from Computer City when they went out of business around that time.

Pentium MMX was out, and PII was out but very late in the year. However, both very very expensive still. Many (most) people still had various P5-style CPUs (K6, Cyrix) (or even still 486) at this time.

As for value, I doubt anyone wants to revisit the days of early DVD playback on PC's, but I've been wrong before about what people will collect.

It might have value to someone who is building a ~1997 system for other reasons, and as a tangent would like it to be able to play their DVDs. But that's probably not very many people.

I had a K6-3 450MHz at one point but I didn't have a DVD drive so I've never tried playing them on that CPU. They worked just fine on a 512KB Xeon 450MHz in PowerDVD 4.0 though. That CPU is the same as a P2-450 except for a full speed L2 cache, which I don't think helps it that much. No SSE.

I seem to recall that a 300MHz Celeron or PII was the minimum for doing DVD software decoding. Not sure where the K6 fits in.,

What most of you guys aren't seeing in context is that nobody wanted to JUST watch a DVD. They wanted to "work" at the same time which meant you had to offload mpeg decoding to get your CPU back for some awesome excel spreadsheet action.

I don't think it was a case of being able to multitask, just a case being able to watch a DVD at all. These required loopback cables since they superimposed the image over the VGA signal (or vice-versa) which means you didn't resize (just fullscreen or not), so unless you had a huge screen and played the DVD windowed, there is no other space to have an excel spreadsheet open, or most other programs for that matter, without covering the video. 1280x1024 was BIG back then, with 800x600/1024x768 being the norm. DVD playback size is 720x576 so doesn't leave much room for anything else.

I had one of the creative encore DVD or something (DVD drive and decoder card) because it was cheaper than a DVD player and my PC at the time could not keep up with playback. In fact I seem to remember all P2's failing to give smooth playback, it took a P3/800 and InterVideo WinDVD for me to lose the DVD card (although P3/500 could possibly do it? idk, I went K6/233 -> P3/800 o.0). 5.1 Audio was all the rage too when DVD's came out and most DVD's had this by default for playback (some not even having 2 channel stereo). My card could decode the 5.1 into Stereo signal for my 2x PC speakers, then 5.1 got popular and you didn't need a massive expensive 5.1 amp, and could get 'PC' subs and 5 satellites cheap enough.

All in all these cards filled the gap that general purpose hardware couldn't (very short time period, maybe 2 years? if that?). gfx cards started to do MPEG decoding as standard, follwed by software being capable enough (PowerDVD/WinDVD).

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I seem to recall that a 300MHz Celeron or PII was the minimum for doing DVD software decoding. Not sure where the K6 fits in.,

With my own PII (266 MHz)I noticed that it was not necessarily the processor that was the bottleneck, but the amount of RAM. DVD-ROM drive + PowerDVD 4.0 + 64 Mb of RAM = 😵 , raise the RAM to 320 Mb and it plays DVDs fine with software decoding (using 194 Mb of RAM on average). Swapping the graphics card might have helped a little, but the RAM was what really made the difference.