What DVD?

I have just bought a nice new set of 6.1 Inspire speakers to match my equally new Audigy 2. I am planning on using my new PC as a games machine/DVD player, thus need to know what specs are important. I am not bothered about being able to write/rewrite DVD's, all I want to do is play them. Is there a top class DVD player for a PC out there that you could recommmmend????

Cheers for any advice offered,

Si.

To be honest, anything that's got a decent brand name, like SONY, LITEON, PIONEER, PLEXTOR, LG, etc... anything like that is fine. DVD drives are well established now, and the quality is fairly high on all of the major brand names as far as I am aware.

What's equally, or perhaps even more important, are the following other factors:

1) Speed of PC's heart - amount of RAM, CPU speed, etc....

2) Quality of graphics card.

3) Whether you have a dedicated MPEG-2 card.

Most cards that aren't complete budget play DVDs no problem.

If you really want to do things trouble free, try getting an MPEG-2 card. These are decoder boards that you fit into a PCI slot and handle the audio and video decoding for you, greatly taking the burden away from the CPU. CPUs have been sufficiently fast now for a while that you don't actually NEED one of these, as such, but they remain really nice.