When the DVD format was new, a 300MHz Pentium II CPU could just barely decode the MPEG-2 stream. And that CPU cost almost two thousand dollars at launch: https

When the DVD format was new, a 300MHz Pentium II CPU could just barely decode the MPEG-2 stream. And that CPU cost almost two thousand dollars at launch: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/pentium-ii-release-date-set/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/pentium-ii-release-d... In other words, there was simply no way to ship affordable DVD players that would use a general purpose CPU for video decoding. It needed to be in hardware.