Today I used much patience trying to get the A7V KT133 board stable or understand how many variable can get it unstable.. I almost forgot about how much sensible these boards were to any changes, not to mention even the bios version differences..
About PC-DVD solutions it was talked about above and those hardware/software decoders of the 2000, even nowdays I think on a time correct monitor they are still great quality solutions. Even the GPU accelerated ones with the right software can result in very high quality decoding without all the unnecessary post processing filters/shaders/whatever nowdays I imagine are used. Of course monitor didn't have ultra high resolutions to upscale to, but I remember and trying that some hw/sw combinations resulted in great video quality. Lately I'm building different PC-DVD config to compare hw and sw quality. ATi video chip since the Rage 128 Pro but I'd prefer since the Radeon chip, with the right software did a great job on the video card choice while instead the hw PCI decoders were another story with good and bad sides depending on the point of view. To get the best results many combinations of hw, sw, drivers, monitors should be tested but once and if everything is set at the best, they resulted great and in the best scenario with almost no cpu impact.
