go for a toshiba drive- they're CloneCD compatible, read anything, and just overall sweetness. Pioneer drives have a tendency to be VERY loud, i recently replaced my Slot-Load 16x Pioneer DVD w/ a Toshiba 16x Tray-Load DVD. there's quite a few people trying to swap their 16x Pioneer for a 12x Toshiba, they're just monsterous. i've had to turn up my dvds when i had that drive to drown out the sound, it was the third pioneer drive i've owned and i've now voewed never to buy another pioneer in my life. they're awesome drives, but they have a tendency to get flaky and the noise level is just the worst for me personally, i know many that will swear by those drives.
decoder cards have a use a bypass method of video that, while routing the video through your decoder card, generally destroys the quality. the hollywood decoder card is the best i've seen i believe, but even so windows text was rendered illegible at 1280x1024. i had to constantly swap the cables in the back when i wanted to watch a dvd, just a major hassle. software dvd is good enough now you don't even need a hardware decoder though (except for tv-out).