Hollywood Plus DVD decoder review
Posted by Thomas
McGuire on September 21, 2000
Company:
Sigma
Designs Product: Hollywood
Plus DVD Decoder
With
the increasing popularity of DVD drives (how many new PC’s
don’t come with one) & home entertainment
systems, more & more people are getting the opportunity
to test out this new, superior media for films. The only
problem is that playing DVD’s on a PC takes a lot
of processor power. With that in mind, hardware DVD
decoders are available to take over this burdensome task.
Offering the promises of better visual quality, freeing CPU
resources & the ability to make pretty much any
machine with a DVD drive capable of smooth DVD playback.
Does the Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus stand up to these
lofty promises? Read on & find out.
Installation
& manual
Installation,
in both Windows 98 SE & Windows 2000 went perfectly. The
card was recognized & drivers were installed accordingly
using the latest versions available from Sigma Designs.
Although, currently the Windows 2000 driver is only a beta
release.
All
that had to be done was to hook up the pass through cable to
the video card & the monitor to the Hollywood Plus.
Although if possible, you can have the Hollywood Plus
connected directly to your TV.
Of some note is that if you encounter problems
installing the card in Windows 2000 (i.e. during
installation of the driver you reboot automatically) you
will need to set Plug & Play OS to No in
the BIOS before installation will occur correctly. This
issue occurred on one of my machines (Using an Asus P3V4X
motherboard, although it didn’t occur on my Pentium 233MMX
machine) & installation went smoothly after changing
that setting until installation was completed. It should be
noted that resetting this back to Yes will result in
a critical (blue screen) error during boot-up for Windows
2000 after installed.
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