PVR-250 Freestyle's mpeg2 decoder - is it ever used?

[sarcasm]

I've read that the PVR-250 oem 'freestyle' version does in fact have the same (or similar) mpeg2 decoding chip on it that the 350 does, but it lacks the audio and s-video outputs. I've also read that the 350 can output decoded mpeg2 on the video outputs only, and nowhere else.

So does this mean that the decoder on the pvr-250 freestyle is useless? Is there any software or driver that can utilize the hardware decoder, perhaps outputting via overlay or something?