What are the differences between hardware and software DVD players?
Descrambling a CSS-scrambled datastream takes time and resources. In order to more efficiently play DVD’s on computers in real time, physical chipsets have been created to do this descrambling independently of the system’s CPU. These hardware playback systems do all the real work in unmangling the scrambled datastream; this frees up resources in the system itself and makes the entire process nearly transparent to the operating system and the CPU. The only thing the application needs to know is how exactly to interface with the decoder board. A software-based DVD player does the same job as the hardware-based player, but does it all using system resources. No special additional software is required. While this method takes up much more resources (and hence usually requires a faster CPU and more memory) it also does not need special interface specifications outside of the ability to read a Micro-UDF format. The LiViD DVD Player is a software-only DVD playback system for Free Unix systems
