Cringely foretells The Great Apple Video Encoder Attack of 2007:
Maybe you have wondered, as I have, why it takes a pretty robust notebook computer to play DVD videos, while Wal-Mart will sell you a perfectly capable progressive-scan DVD player from Philips for $38? In general, the dedicated DVD player is not only a lot cheaper, it works better, too, and the simple reason is because it decodes the DVD’s MPEG-2 video stream in hardware, rather than in software. They won’t run a spreadsheet, true, but DVD players are brilliant at doing what they are designed to do over and over again. And if the expedient here is a $7 MPEG-2 decoder chip, it’s a wonder why such chips didn’t appear long ago in PCs.Well they are about to, after a fashion.