EPIA M9000 PVR 350 Hardware Decode?

[Droid]

Ok, I am a newbie to this. I have a Tivo and a Replay and decided I wanted the all in one box. Built a nice 200 gig (got the $40 deal from techbargains) 933 EPIA system with a PVR 350. The DVD drive came with PowerDVD and it has a check box (in its player app) for hardware acceleration. A) Does that mean any app (Sage TV) will use hardware acceleration now? B) How can I tell it which hardware decoder to use? I have the PVR 350 and the CLE266 on the EPIA. C) which should I use? I want the box to be brain dead simple (Like the Tivo) so that my wife can use it. I also an concerned that the 933 CPU will die without using hardware decode. I dont want to have a different output for DVD than the rest of the stuff from SAGE etc... Help?