> I've never really been happy with the quality of software decoders or cards
> with MPEG offload (not full decode) so I hope this card lives up to my
> expectations :-)

why do you think, that h.264 software decoders has poor quality, than hardware decoders?

My biggest problems in the past have been A/V sync problems, "tearing" and slow channel change times.  I've had similar problem with software based MPEG-2 decoders but after a lot of tweaking I was able to get nice image quality but still had occasional A/V sync problem and channel change times were still slow.  I've never (or very rarely) had these problems with hardware based MPEG-2 decoders.

Jeremy