Reply 20 of 23, by 386SX
Beside the external Creative amplificator/decoder kit which had both the 5.1 analog amplifier and the digital decoder processing board , I'm not sure, maybe the "Sound Blaster Live! 5.1" or the "Audigy", one or both maybe had the Surround Mixer option to decode the 5.1 stream and pass it to their own analog output channels but I never understood if that was done in hardware or software with the help maybe of the cpu instructions already advanced at that time.
About the Pentium II 233Mhz I'm not sure that without a vga of its time usually not even having motion compensation acceleration would have been capable alone of a perfect smooth mpeg2 decoding but I remember it depended also on which software player, so the H+ decoder card was still a good choice. I had the equivalent Creative Dxr3 because my K6-2 cpu couldn't easily decode mpeg2 without lowering final quality by software and the Voodoo3 video card had none of both accelerations but the basic ones only so I found these cards to be great not to mention later when paired with the DTT2500 speaker kit.
Too bad these decoder cards in the 90's never found a perfect "armony" between compatibility and image quality. Some went for the external vga pass cable solution that together with the overlaying process plus a thin proprietary cable and often not the best monitors too, solved most vga compatibilities but at the cost of sharpness of the image quality; others dvd decoder PCI brands went for the feature connector internally connected to the vga that theorically would have solved the image quality problem but most of the time had compatibility problems with different vga, drivers, resolutions, color depth etc (beside the ones built for specific vga in specific add-in modules). The latest dvd decoder X-Card PCI card took another road basically switching from the vga input to a full screen not overlayed vga output, solving mostly both problems but at the cost of having a full screen only result without the useful earlier window mode with the desktop still usable, and at the end still having an analog vga output when maybe it should have gone for the DVI output solution or using the PCI bus as was done with older 3D add-in accelerator like the Matrox m3D.
