Originally posted by: dwcal
Creative CT7160 DVD decoder- It worked, but it had buggy drivers. The most annoying part was that it wouldn't letterbox widescreen movies! It stretched the picture to the full height of the screen. That was so annoying. I hated that thing. Replaced it with a Hollywood+ that I shoulda bought to begin with. Should've tossed it years ago, but it still might be sitting in my closet.
Ha! I had one of those. I made the (mistake?) of buying a "Creative Labs DVD Multimedia Kit 700" or somesuch, from my then-employer, who had a small computer-reseller business. Some customer returned it, and the box was in kinda crappy shape, so I made a deal to buy at around cost.
Still cost me like $200 or so, I think. (Maybe $250?) Anyways, it included.. a 4MB Creative Labs Graphics Blaster Exxtreme card, PCI Permedia2 chipset, CT7160 DVD decoder card (and 26-pin VPE cable), SB Awe64 Value ISA, Creative 2X IDE DVD-ROM, and PCWorks 2.1 speaker set.
Stupid me thought, without fully reading the side of the box, that since this was a complete DVD multimedia kit, it would include 4-channel surround-sound. I didn't realize that Creative also made a 2.1 speaker set at the time, or that the sound card included wasn't even capable of 4-channel sound. Yeah, I know, should always do your homework before buying hardware, but this was kind of an impulse use-it-or-lose-it deal.
Clearly, I overpaid, but individually the components found some use, I still use the speakers and DVD drive to this day. (RPC1 baby - no region-coding!) I don't think that I ever used the DVD decoder card though, I sold it for $5 some years later. (My PII and ATI RagePro AGP had enough power to decode DVDs on their own, thankfully, and with better quality than that "decoder".) The SB Awe64 Value was a nice little upgrade to my SB16 ISA too.
I probably should have just saved my money though, and bought some seperate speakers and a DVD-ROM drive.