Laptop dvd decoder cards

[AMCRambler]

Has anybody used one of those laptop mpeg-2 decoder cards that plug into a PCMCIA slot? I' buying a pentium 2 300mhz laptop and hope to later on buy the optional internal dvd drive. I have a feeling the playback is not going be very good since the processor is that slow. I was thinking of perhaps buying an mpeg-2 decoder card if the quality did stink and I was wondering just how much it would help? Also any recommendations on which one to buy would also be great. Thanks.

 

[John]

Margi DVD-to-go works like a champ.

I forgot to add linkage. http://www.margi.com/products/dvdtogo.html

 

[Mingon]

Have a look on EB*Y as there is normally loads, be aware though that you need a ZV enabled pcmcia slot for it to work. I have a 600mhz thinkpad which I use with a dell decoder ( based on the margi) and compared to the software players the quality is superb at 1024x768 (which it couldnt manage before) and the cpu utilisation is around 25% compared to 50-60% previously.

 

[zsouthboy]

There's some going on EBAY right now, they're 20 bucks.

Example:

KINGMAX ZV-DVD DECODER 4 MPEG-2 for HW DVD
Ebay

That's what Im gettin for mine.

zs

 

[StormRider]

I have a Margi DVD card and it works well on my old Pentium 133 laptop. As Mingon stated, you need to make sure you have a ZV enabled PCMCIA slot.

However, my old laptop has an older passive LCD screen and the quality of DVDs is not good because the response of the LCD screen is too slow (lots of blurring etc).

 

[AMCRambler]

The laptop I'm getting is an IBM Thinkpad 390E and from what I've read on IBM's site about this model is that the PCMCIA slots on it do have Zoom Video support(ZV i'm guessing) and also the screen is a TFT active matrix display so hopefully I won't run into any blurring like StormRider was getting. So it looks like I'll be in good shape whether I need to get a decoder card or not. Thanks for the help. I wasn't having much luck finding info on the decoder cards anywhere. Anandtech rocks!