DVD setup question

[robopig]

Hi,
Friend has a dell with a dvd drive, decoder card and video card, he tells me there is a ribbon cable going from his decoder card to his video card, he recently tried to upgrade to a geforceMX based card but the spot where it looked like the cable would attach didnt have any pins on it, does anyone know if the connection he is talking about is a standard interface, or something proprietary for his hardware setup?
Ive read alot of decoders using pass through cables but he says this is an internal not external cable, im wondering if that decoder will only be of use with the vid card he has, I have no DVD drives myself so Im not familiar with the setup, he only has a 450 so I wouldnt imagine softwaredvd playback is great at that level?
thanks for any info,
Dave

 

[Auric]

That might be a VMI connector. There might be some MX cards that have it. What I do know for sure is that a C450 is plenty for DVD, especially with motion compensation.

 

[Grizzy7]

I've used a couple of DVD units. The first was a Creative DXR2 & pretty unstable, but it was one of the first ones out. The current one I'm using is a Pioneer 10X with a Hollywood Magic decoder ($60) in a P3-366MHZ paired with a Voodoo 3500. Talk about smooth ... has onscreen contrast, brightness, and color contorls ... great pictures on 45" projection. Both DVDs used an external pass-through. I would imagine the Dell is doing the same thing only internally using specially oem contracted components. I also built a P3-730MHZ for a customer with a Pioneer 10X ($115) but without the hardware decoder and using PowerDVD for the software. It's not completely smooth and was unacceptable to him and he ended up buying a standalone DVD player for his TV. So regardless of the cpu speed I think the hardware decoder is the much better way to go.

Griz