I play MPEG2 files from my hard disk through the TV-Out on my video card to the TV screen, via a software player like Windows MediaPlayer. The player occasionally drops a lot of frames and the motion is jerky. I am guessing that the frames are being dropped after the CPU decodes the MPEG and then sends the huge uncompressed video data to the video card.

Is there such a thing as a hardware MPEG playback card? I'm hoping such a device exists which can read the MPEG file from disk, decode, and send the video data directly to output composite video connectors on the card itself.

Any ideas?