what kind of video card for DVD??

[polypterus]

Hey, my dad wants me to build him a computer, mostly just for "home office" use but he also wants a DVD player. What video card should I use? Would something like a geforce 2 mx 200 be good? Feel free to dumb it down as I know very little about DVD, thanks.

dc

 

[sean2002]

This is an easy one. ATI's Radeon based cards have the best DVD by far and also better 2d quality, perfect for the home office. You can pick up a Radeon LE for under $80 at pricewatch

 

[Rand]

If you want good 2D and the best DVD available then the answer is clearly to gow ith ATI. preferably the Radeon, though if you want to save money and won't be doing much gaming on the machines a Rage 128 based card would be quite cheap and still has pretty good 2D, and top notch DVD quality.

 

[Hawk]

You could get the Radeon VE for like 70-80 bucks also, has dual head (two monitors).

 

[UKtaxman]

To be fair, unless you plan on doing other computer work at the same time then almost any card will suffice. A lot of people will tell you to get a Radeon, but I see little difference between ATI decoded DVD and that done by my old Voodoo5, or GF2mx(with PowerDVD3/WinDVD). I think that if your system is fast enough then all you'll need is a TVout. ATI fans appear to be clinging on to the DVD playback thing as their last hope of Radeon being better than any other card(something that is totally unfair), or maybe just to justify their purchase ahead of the equivalent Nvidia card.
Alternatively you could just buy a dedicated DVD decoder card for about $30 and have even better quality still and DD5.1 as a bonus!