With these dedicated devices the engineers often were able to cut corners or use custom hardware. This probably wasn't the case with DVD players (because the e

With these dedicated devices the engineers often were able to cut corners or use custom hardware. This probably wasn't the case with DVD players (because the effort wouldn't have been worth it for a mass market consumer product) but 1980s Amiga home computers for example in some regard still outperformed mid-1990s PCs, which nominally were several orders of magnitude faster. They were able to pull this off by clever hardware tricks and due to custom chips that were highly optimised for very specific use cases. Run-of-the-mill PCs on the other hand were standardised and designed to perform good on average in most situations, not just very specific ones.