If you're thinking about upgrading an aging
CD-ROM drive, be sure to replace it with a
DVD-ROM or DVD-RAM kit. These drives play
all previous CD formats as well as the new
DVD movie, game, and edutainment titles.
Though more expensive, a DVD-RAM drive
also serves as a removable-storage drive (for
backups and the like) with a generous 4.6GB
of (formatted) capacity per cartridge. And the
newest 2X DVD drives can move data at up to
2.6 MBps, which is equivalent to the speed of
a 16X CD-ROM drive.
For this roundup, we looked at four DVD kits.
Each includes a hardware MPEG-2 decoder
card that lets you use the drive to watch
movies. Note that some manufacturers believe
there's sufficient surplus processing power in
a high-end desktop PC for decoding MPEG-2
movies in software. To find out how practical
this approach is, we ran in-house tests
comparing software decoding against
hardware decoding on two base machines--an
NEC Pentium II/300 and a Dell Pentium II/400.
Each used the Matrox Millennium G-200 AGP
graphics card, which is compatible with
software DVD via a $10 online purchase.
We performed our evaluations using movies
such as Twister and the test disk that
accompanies Jim Taylor's book DVD
Demystified. With software DVD decoding, we
saw startlingly jumpy scenes with lots of
tearing and color shifting. Hardware DVD,
using the Creative Labs kit (reviewed below),
was satisfactory.
All four kits in this group share some similar
features. For example, all use PCI-based
decoding cards with analog video overlay for displaying DVD images on your
PC's monitor, along with automatic adjustment, which makes configuration
easy. All also offer composite and digital audio output.
