It's faster to decode in software

It's the transfer across the PCI bus that adds the time. Any other application has to bring the compressed file to the application, realise it needs to go to the card for decompression, then send the uncompressed data back to the application.

it's much faster to disable the hardware and use the transcoder to decode Media 100 files if you don't need to play in real time (ie in AE)

Philip