Any Use for a Hollywood Plus DVD-Player Card Using EM8300 MPEG2 Decoder?

June 4, 2004 11:50 PM

I have a Hollywood Plus DVD-player card, PCI. It uses the EM8300 Mpeg 2 decoder. Are there any hacks or mods for this card to do cool things, or should I throw it away?

Sounds like its going out.

posted by Keyser Soze to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Sounds like you could use it to turn an otherwise very out-dated desktop into a serviceable DVD playing machine, if you're so inclined. It's got S-video out, after all. Throw it in a $20 beige box and you've got... uh... something!
posted by scarabic at 3:24 PM on June 5, 2004

Aren't the Hollywood cards pretty long? If they aren't, you might throw it into one of the feebler VIA Eden / EPIA boxes -- such as that fanless 533MHz thing they make which is too slow to play back DVDs -- and make a set top box.

Given that you'll be using Windows since Hollywood cards don't work with anything else, you could probably get some old games to run on it and play them on TV. Poor man's XBox!
posted by majick at 4:09 PM on June 5, 2004

Response by poster: Threw it out. I don't like anything under 800mhz. Which is kind of funny, because a few months ago I had this old pentium 75 laptop with 16MB of RAM and no battery that I installed a bunch if old MS-DOS games on, and put some music on it.
posted by Keyser Soze at 1:07 AM on June 6, 2004