Hello All! I have discovered some interesting things. First, I am a registered tvtool member, and I saw that claim on tvtool too. I think it's a great program, but that 'benchmark test' was a little shady. Did you see how he conducted that test? it also seemed kind of outdated...strangely unprofessional, but hey, it seems like it's the brainchild of one guy! Well first, the Philips chip is found only on some geforce ti- models or msi geforce cards (don't ask me, msi must have some commercial relationship with philips). So the philips is found on mostly high-end cards, whereas the majority of tvtool (poll on the site) said they had geforce2 (low end) cards, which RARELY has the philips chip. This seems kinda self serving, since tvtool is relevant only to mainly geforce owners, being that conexant chips are mostly found on geforce (lower end) cards, whereas philips is most often found on radeon cards, ahem...well, i guess you can draw your own conclusions...
SOLUTION:
ANYWAYS, for pure quality, plain and simple, I have decided to go the seperate decoder route. On ebay, I bought a realmagic hollywood plus decoder card (10 bucks), which is a dedicated mpeg2 dvd card. This is supposed to kill this argument, because hardware decoders don't tax the cpu to decode, and it's a dedicated hard worker. Installing it was pretty easy w/ the new drivers from sigmadesigns site, and I have to say, it looks TONS better than the combo of geforce2 decode and tvtool doing the output. (Tvtool still is sweet for video games and such...it's so damn CLEAR.) Finally, via hollywood plus, it actually looks like a real dvd player picture! No kidding!
Now I'm working on hooking up the dolby digital via my soundblaster live to my receiver, seems like some work, but looks like finally i'm going to have a real substitute for a dvd player!