I'm no expert, but on doing a quick bout of research, it looks like there were different players put out by different manufacturers. NVidia had their PureVideo player that used the hardware chip on their early GeForce cards. Windows Media Player was supposed to have support, but there's not a lot of quick/easy info. Google popped this link: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3063 … -player-for-win during my search. InterVideo WinDVD is a name I have seen, but it was a long time ago, like early Windows XP days. Cyberlink PowerDVD is software I still use today on my modern systems (I am now on PowerDVD 15 - meaning 2015).

Since WinDVD hits such a memory in my head, I pulled this. I have no idea if any of the links are valid, but you could try.
http://dvdsoft.narod.ru/windvd.html

You might want to search this board on this topic since threads on hardware and/or software DVD decoders pop up from time to time:

DVD playback for my Pentium MMX 233 custom?
Reccommend me DVD playing software for Windows 95

andreja6 wrote:

So I'm trying to play some DVD's on my old windows 98 machine, but the pentium II at 400Mhz isnt that great with DVD video. I want to know if anyone has any good choices for software that uses Hardware MP2 decoding, Rather than software?

My PC has 640MB of ram, Pentium II-400, and a VooDoo3

Your PC should be more than powerful enough for DVD playback...except maybe for the video card. Does it provide for MPEG-2 hardware decoding?

If so, try finding a copy of PowerDVD 5.0 (works fine for DVD playback on my P2-266 with half your RAM and a measly Asus TNT2 M64 🤣 ).

Hi, back in in the early 2000s I used PowerDVD XP (v4 ?).
Later, I upgraded to PowerDVD 6 Deluxe. It supported Audio-DVDs and more SIMD instructions (SSE/3DNow!),
but was still compatible to Win98SE/Me. Hardware-assisted acceleration was also selectable,
if the GPU/Windows drivers allowed for it. I used an S3 Chrome for that, which had a nice hardware-decoder.

PowerDVD 7 added support for Vista (v6 relied on DDraw, but got an update ?) and got an OEM release that supported HD-DVD.
An update added Bluray-supoort, I believe. PowerDVD v8 dropped support for HD-DVD again.

That voodoo 3 can do hardware DVD, MPEG-1 andMPEG-2, playback if i recall.

I believe folks mosly used PowerDVD back in the day

There was a DVD software called Software Cinemaster 99 that was excellent on these old 9x machines. Various companies rebranded it to include with their cards. It's hard to find though. I think it gives better quality and performance results than the popular PowerDVD or WinDVD recommendation.

info
http://www.pennskog.com/cinemaster/software.htm

Also, KLite Codec Pack 3.45 works on Windows 98 and includes the PowerDVD MPEG2 decoder. This requires DXVA support for acceleration. Older chips do not necessarily support DXVA for their MPEG2 acceleration interface.

Jade Falcon wrote:

That voodoo 3 can do hardware DVD, MPEG-1 andMPEG-2, playback if i recall.

No it only supports some basic video features. Colorspace conversion and scaling.

The best old MPEG2 cards are ATI Rage 128 or later. SiS 6326. GeForce 4 and later. Maybe others I can't think of offhand. These process iDCT and motion compensation, reducing CPU usage dramatically.

I have an ATi Rage II+DVD card, what DVD software is compatible with it?

DVD accelerators compared