Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding drive performance
Review: I have watched all sorts of DVDs on this drive, including very scratched ones, but never had a problem, picture quality is just amazing.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Bad - You might not need it all though
Review: I just purchased this kit and it has its pluses and minuses. It turned out that I did not need the MPEG decoder card (Dxr3) that came with it to watch DVDs...First the pluses: 1) Easy installation. Great instructions made it a snap The Minuses: 1) The kit uses a video loopback. No big deal - you actually run a short video cable from your video card to the Dxr3 card, and then plug your monitor into the Dxr3 card. The problem: a noticable degradation of video quality when passing the video signal to my monitor, through the Dxr3 card. Specifically, text gets thick and fuzzy/blurry. My wife noticed it right away, so I tried going back to getting video directly from the video card and the video quality went back to excellent. Something in the Dxr3 card was degrading the video - bummer. Note: I went to the Creative Lab's newsgroup/bulleting board and this seems to be a common problem - others were posting the same comment. 2) The DVD playing software: I was using it on Windows ME, and I have to say that using it was not straight forward. Cryptic controls like "video overlay" that you need to use to get the video diplay working are not intuitive/explained well. When in full screen mode, I could not figure out (for the life of me) how to shut off the player - there was no "exit" function - how do you shut this thing off!?. Also, the on screen remote had some serious problems - it would turn partially see-through while watching a movie and you couldn't make out hte different buttons. Overall very dissapointing The best part (for me)I DID NOT NEED the decoder card. It turns out that, if you're computer has a processor that is faster than 700Mhz, your computer can use a "software based decoder" - the computer's main processors are fast enough these days to do it without the assistance of a special card. I ended up removing the card and downloading InterVideo's WinDVD player. It was fantastic! The picture quality was actually better than the picture quality form the Dxr3 card. I watched an entire movie with NO freezing, blockiness or jaggies - perfect DVD quality playback. WinDVD has multichannel support, so if you have Creative's Live! (with digital IO board) sound card, you get 5.1 surround output through the sound card. I have a Cambridge Soundworks DTT22500 speakers - combined with my Live! soundcard and WinDVD, it's an incredible setup. Why get the Dxr3 card? 1) If you don't have a soundcard with a digital (spdif) output and want digital surround, you'll need the DXr3. 2) If you want to output to your TV, the Dxr3 has an S-video out and an RCA jack video out. 3) If your PC has a slower processor (I'd recomend at least a PIII 600 Mhz) you'll want the Dxr3 Otherwise just get Creative's 12X DVD drive (sold without the Dxr3 card) and buy/download a software based DVD decoder.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Product But Very Poor Support
Review: I purchased this drive in December of 2000. Since the software did not work with my Windows 2000 operating system, I downloaded the beta driver for the DXR3 board. It work somewhat fine, but it caused several problems with other drivers on my system. Uninstalling the driver's did not work and after two weeks and a dozen phone calls to Creative Labs, I finally just reinstalled Windows from scratch. The drive works fine now, but the DXR3 board is sitting on the shelf and hasn't been used since. After nine months, there's still no support for Windows 2000 and I feel like I've been ripped off... Creative Labs has had more then enough time to come up with something for Windows 2000 users. The included software is decent, but I found other programs that are much better. I'd give it 5 stars if the drivers were usable.
Rating: 
Summary: False Advertisement from Creative Labs
Review: I totally understand what the previous reviewer said about this DVD player not running on Win2K machines. I purchased a similar Creative Labs PC-DVD (it was the Ovation 12X) and it said ON THE BOX that it runs on Win2K machines. Bottom line..... they are wrong. It's not worth waiting for them to come out with an update because by then, a better DVD player will come out. This will be the last item I ever purchase from Creative Labs.
Rating:
Summary: Does have Win 2K drivers!
Review: I'm not sure whether new drivers have been available for the other reviewers but the card works perfectly for me. I did need to update the drivers to the new Win2K ones- but once that was accomplished I had no problems...
Rating:
Summary: Don't buy this if you are using Windows 2000
Review: It turns out that Creative doesn't have supported Windows 2000 drivers for this product. After several hours of troubleshooting and effort getting it to work, I finally contacted Creative to see if they could be any help. They told me they don't yet support Windows 2000 (though W2K's been available now for almost a year), and that they can't help. I asked what to do next, and they said to return it to the place I purchased it. Do yourself a favor and don't buy this product...
Rating:
Summary: Win2K drivers that work!
Review: Looks great and had no troubles after I downloaded and installed the new Win2K drivers.
Rating:
Summary: DVD-ROM is fine, but forget about watching DVDs!
Review: This product is awful. Stay away from it. Creative is way behind the times in releasing drivers for modern versions of Windows, let alone Linux. Every time I try to watch a DVD under XP, the DVD applicaton hangs, and I have to restart my machine. Too bad it's too late to return this!
Rating:
Summary: compatibility problems
Review: This worked fine in my old computer (AMD K6 450MHz, built-in sound/video on motherboard, Win98SE), but was horrible in my new box (AMD Athlon 900MHz, Voodoo 3 video, Win98SE). Wouldn't play DVDs using any software (PC-DVD, WinDVD, PowerDVD, Windows DVD Player). PC-DVD and WinDVD both locked up. PowerDVD decided it wouldn't play copyrighted DVDs. Windows DVD Player apparently didn't recognize the Dxr3 decoder card, because it kept saying the player wasn't properly configured and I couldn't play DVDs without a decoder. Tech support was prompt but not very helpful. I did at least a half-dozen different things they suggested and the problem was never solved. I finally replaced it (and my CD-RW, which was okay) with an LG Electronics GCC-4120B CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive, which came bundled with PowerDVD; the new drive has worked great.
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