You could just stuff a used hollywood+ card in and be able to watch 
dvds-mpgs
D

CSB wrote:
> Ooops! forgot the tag.
> 
> Hi All,
> 
>  I have an old(er) computer, that has trouble playing mp3 files and doing
> other stuff at the same time (especially games, etc.) I tried various 
> players, but they all use 10-20% CPU power. That is a lot. So, I had the
> idea of having a hardware decoder inside the PC, that would do all the 
> work. Luckily, I have unused ISA slots on my motherboard. Plus, I have
> a free stereo sound input on my soundcard!
> 
> So, I thought I might put an mp3 decoder chip, some RAM (probably DRAM,
> since it's so cheap, and I have a few MB lying around here and there),
> and some programmable logic to be the glue between the bus, the decoder
> and the memory bank. Then, I would have a small piece of software that
> would retrieve chunks of mp3 files, buffer them on the decoder card, and
> control things such as play, pause, next, prev., etc.
> 
> However, this would involve quite a lot of work. I tried to find similar
> projects on the net, but I have found none. I did find hundreds of 'first
> ever portable mp3 player!!!', but they are all based on memory devices
> or IDE drives. That is not what I am looking for. Surprisingly, even the
> PICLIST archive turned up nothing.
> 
> Has anyone heard of such a thing?
> 
> 
> Christian

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