[AnotherGoodName]

Those DVD sound card+drive bundles weren't for connectivity to the drive in that era however (ATAPI and SCSI were the only standards for DVD-ROM drives). The bundle was to get a card with a hardware MPEG2 decoder since MPEG2 was taxing on the systems of the era.

With the exception of the TV out those cards were a terrible investment though. CPUs went from Pentium 120Mhz to Athlon 1000Mhz within 5 years and the playback software got optimized massively as well (CyberLink PowerDVD was a big success since it could enable MPEG2 playback on even a lowly Pentium MMX).

In fact i remember being given a couple of those cards in that era since pretty much everyone could play DVDs without the dedicated hardware and no one could be bothered setting up the drivers for it.

[mikepurvis]

I had a P4 (~1.6GHz) at one point and I remember DVD playback even on that system was a bit flaky. Like it was mostly good but would hitch for a second or two every fifteen minutes. Just often enough to make it pretty annoying for trying to actually watch a full movie.

[AnotherGoodName]

If you were still in that era i'd say make sure the drive is in DMA and not PIO mode!

The drives would operate in a fallback mode called PIO unless you installed specific drivers for the DVD drive. The symptoms you describe sound like this. 1.6Ghz was definitely enough for MPEG2 decoding.

[mrpippy]

Apple started using software DVD decoding once the G3 hit 500 MHz (with the dual USB white iBook)