PCI video cards worth anything on the pc side?

[Santilli]

Between the increase in resolution, and the new ability to play DVD's while working, I've been thinking about another monitor. I have an SBS box that I used with my mac, sitting in storage.

Anyone have a decent PCI video card, for DVD stuff, quality only, they would recommend?

Don't want to break the bank...
gs

 

[Groltz]

Greg,

I keep a PCI video card for backup in case I ever get the inclination to tamper with my main AGP video card's bios and a glitch occurs. If this happens, a person's best chance at recovering is to flash the original bios back into the AGP card, using a backup PCI card to allow viewing of the screen.

The card I picked for this duty is the lowly Jaton Video-158PCI-64TV which has a GeForce4 MX440 chip with 64MB DDR memory. Although I haven't used it for any DVD playback, I can note that it works quite well otherwise. The 2D looked fine to me and it handled some light gaming fairly well too.

The card I have has the RCA Composite and S-Video jacks along with the usual VGA jack.

Some notes from Jaton's site:

• MPEG video playback support
• High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP) for full-screen, video playback of HDTV and DVD resolutions
• Independent hardware color controls for video overlay
• Hardware color space conversion (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)

Available for the lawyer-busting price of $53

-Steve