Do I need a Decoder Card

The V3 is a decoder card with a cool chipset hooked on, if you have jitter problems don't run other programs when you are playing the DVD and try running defrag on your HD, also try booting clean then play the movie.

There is an application you can pick up for a modest price as well called WinDVD 2000. It will function in place of a decoder card. I ran it on a PII 266 w/ 96mb Ram and a V3 2000 PCI and the playback was quite good.

Just my $.02
Good Luck

Nah, I need someone with the same card and type of system (Even worse) to see if they have probs. (I already know about winDVD which isn't really a software decorder more a DVD player app)

If the V3 is a decoder card like compmania said, then you should try what he mentioned, run nothin but the dvd movie.  WinDVD is a player and also it has a decoder. Try PowerDVD, I read it somewhere that PowerDVD has a better decoder than WinDVD and all other DVD softwares. I don't have a decoder card but my dvd movies look fine with PowerDVD.

boom23: You are running PowerDVD w/o a MPEG-2 decoder card? Wow, didn't know you could do that. You are using a DVD drive right?

The Voodoo 3000 AGP Graphics card is not a dedicated decorder card it only has a mention on the spec of DVD hardware assist, whether that is enough or not I don't know, what I am looking for is someone with the same card to tell me if they are having problems without a dedicated decoder card or not.

Cheers for the comments anyway. :-)

Boom23 what kind of graphics card do you use?

Yes I'm running PowerDVD without mpeg 2 decoder card. I'm using DVD drive and also playing plain VOB files and the movies look fine. My graphics is Sis 6326 AGP card with 8mb. I know it's amazing, i was quite surprised when the dvd movies actually play without problems.

I have a creative dvd player with voodoo 3 2000. My decoder card went bad so I downloaded a free trial copy of windvd to check it out. Video quality wasn't bad but not as good as with card. Also it was a little jerky.

Almost forgot, you can get WinDVD here:

http://www.intervideo.com/intervideo/buy
windvd.asp?dept%5Fid=1&sku=001

Can you prove that winDVD is better than powerDVD?

I will do just that, thanks for the advice.