@foone ISTR dedicated MPEG-2 decoder cards that went along with those drives because there wasn't enough processor power to deal with DVD playback? Or is this a conflated memory, I wonder.
@foone@Stormgren makes sense; Win95 predates MMX and 3DNow!, so processors without those features would've been very slow at doing the inverse DCT and motion compensation calculations.
@gsuberland@foone@Stormgren
Yups. I had an MPEG decoder card in, if I remember correctly, an AMD K6-500 box connected to the living room TV. This was 1999, so it might have been Win 98 rather than 95 though. Mostly used it watching VCDs, but even those were too much for cpu-only decoding.
@gsuberland@foone@Stormgren I had a Celeron 400 around the time DVDs were popular, and it was just barely fast enough to play them (I specifically remember using Cinemaster, because both WinDVD and PowerDVD were jerky in panning scenes).
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