Player for slow computer

[metramo]

I installed XP and a DVD player on a Celeron 300 PC for my daughter.

When playing DVD's on the computer, they are jerky with every player I used. Maybe because of the player, maybe because of the processor, maybe because of XP.

A DivX played from the harddisk of the system doesn't show the samejumpyness.

I tried Windows Media, VLC adn some other players with the same behavoir.

R

[Dark-Cracker]

hi,

i think mplayer could read DVD it's one of the player who use the less memory and processor CPU.

PS : perhaps do you try to switch on win98 because XP use a lot of ressources, this will perhaps help u.

but if you want to use your (dauther) computer only for dvd or movie playing i think there is surely some light version of linux especially for movie playing.

Good luck ++

[buzzqw]

you can try something like MoviX (on sourceforge) !

BHH

[m99]

re: metramo

Unless you are very unlucky you should be able to overclock it, many 300MHz has no problem running at 450MHz. WinXP is a hog, so 256MB memory is recommended.

[yaz]

Originally posted by m99
Unless you are very unlucky you should be able to overclock it, many 300MHz has no problem running at 450MHz. WinXP is a hog, so 256MB memory is recommended. i can confirm it. my good old celeron 366 had no problem w/any dvd when i put enough ram under winxp. some overlock (if possible safely) may just help. u wouldn't expect any posprocess, of course.

the bests
y

[metramo]

Thanx for the advise, as I understand I have three possibilities of action.

1 - Use Win98, problem is the DVD is not recognized under win98 so I have to explore why.

2 - Add some more memory to XP, I now have 256 and I can go to 384. If I don't find some simms I don't think this will be my choice.

3 - Since I suppose mplayer does not exist under windows (am I wrong?), find some linux to play the DVD's. I'll try some linux bootable on CD, maybe movix exists as CD bootable.
Or Knoppix !!?

[buzzqw]

movix

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/movix/movix2-0.3.1rc2-iso.zip?download

BHH

[yaz]

before u go mad of it ;)

- what does 'jerky' mean exactly ? is it a constant 'pumping' or is it sg noticable only at quick motions (or only at random) ? if the latter, it can be a propblem of wrong monitor synch. the refresh rate of the monitor must (should) be a multiple of the video frame rate ( x24 for 'film', x25 for pal, x30 for ntsc ) for providing the smoothest playback.
- do the different players produce the same jerkiness ? hard question, i know, but the different players burdens the system quite differently. try media player classic w/default settings. it has everything for dvd playback and its consumption is low to mid.
- does this jerkiness annoy anyone else than u ? ('what jerkiness ??? oh, let me watch it, pls !!!'; a quote from my wife) if not, leave it as it is ;)

the bests
y

[Brother John]

Also screen resolution can play an important part. On my old P2 400 MHz I had to switch to 800x600 for smooth playback of 4:3 content.

BSPlayer always was really low on ressourcse. Don't know if it can play DVDs though.

[Joe Fenton]

BSPlayer will play DVDs if you have the proper codecs installed (MPEG2, AC3, etc.). The biggest help for playing DVDs on slow systems is to make sure you have the proper video driver for the card and that it supports video overlays. Without video overlay support, the CPU has to convert the yv12 DVD video into RGB pixels. This consumes so much time that it's near impossible to play the DVD back with less than a 2GHz processor.

[samab]

Your DVD drive may not have DMA mode turn on. If your drive is transferring data by PIO mode, it eats more CPU time.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=817472

If you go back to graphics card of the era, you will find that ATI (and other graphics manufacturer) implemented something called "hardware assist" for DVD decoding (the technical name is called motion compensation).

http://www.ati.com/companyinfo/press/1998/4106.html

With "hardware assist" on your graphics card, the minimum specs for DVD decoding is 266 MHz on Windows 98. So even if you do everything I listed below, your computer may still be too slow for DVD playing.

The big problem for you is that when Microsoft released Windows XP in 2001, those graphics cards were already 3 years old. So neither Microsoft nor the graphics card manufacturers spent the time to write proper drivers to turn those hardware acceleration on.

(1) Download the latest April 2005 release of directx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=402111C4-6478-46C1-BBD9-1BF9FCCE52F4&displaylang=en

(2) Download the latest video card driver and audio driver

(3) Make sure your dvd drive has DMA turn on

(4) Use a "no frills" video software player (such as the free open source media player classic).

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303&package_id=84358

(5) Configure your video player to play stereo channel only (not all 5.1 channels). And configure your video player to display on 640 x 480 in full screen mode.

[CruNcher]

@ metramo
get the newest drivers,directx 9c and Media Player Classic as samab allready mentioned and after that install this

http://www.elecard.com/ftp/pub/mpeg/decoder/mpgdec_dxva_2_1_4921_ev.zip

load the dvd or any mpeg-2 video, then stop the video go to the filter menu select the Elecard Video Decoder filter then go to the Settings tab and check "Hardware acelleration" if this won't work or isn't enough, than you could also buy a dedicated mpeg-2 decoder card from ebay.