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View Full Version : Best OS to use for a PC-based player?


JimmyBarnes
24th September 2005, 11:35
My current PC player is:

MSI KM2M Combo-L mainboard (MS-6738)
AMD CPU (see below)
256 MHz PC2700 DDR RAM
10 GB Fujitsu HDD
LiteOn SOHC-5235K DVD-ROM/CD±RW drive (DMA enabled in OS)
Compaq Geforce2 MX/MX400 AGP card
Windows Millenium

This has been very successful in playing XviD/DivX3,4,5 AVIs for the past two years, though since I changed from storing these on DVD-R 4.7GB instead of CD-R 700MB, I have increased resolutions often well above 640x and used appropriately high bitrates to get good quality video.

This has resulted in the original 700 MHz Duron CPU being progressively upgraded to 1 GHz Duron, then 1.3 GHz Duron and recently to Athlon XP 2400+ (2.0 GHz).

The main reason for the CPU upgrades was because I found certain AVIs would lose AV sync, or freeze for several seconds (would self-correct and continue).

Most of my rips are XviD which I understand requires much more CPU power to decode than does DivX5. Player has been mostly ZoomPlayer 4.03 WMV.

I'm still getting some freezes even with the XP 2400+ (no other changes). Would using XP as the OS rather than Me fix this problem or tend to make it worse? I deliberately chose Me as it is less hardware demanding than XP. I know Me has bad press but I have generally had good results with it on a variety of PCs.

Your insight and (especially) experience please

thanx
JB

Shinigami-Sama
25th September 2005, 06:01
well
you violtated rule what ever...
you asked whats best

anyways
for cpu useage linux _CAN_ be better but that depends on various stuff so yeah
linux is good, wondows can be hit ot mis depending on settings

Joe Fenton
25th September 2005, 08:30
Windows 98/Me always pauses every so often, both in videos and games. That's my experience at least. Windows 2K and XP don't have that problem. Linux also doesn't have this problem. I think it's a multitasking issue. It was a common complaint I had until I moved from Me to 2K.

An Athlon 2400+ should play anything short of 1920x1080 without a hicough. An Xvid encode and a DivX encode with the same parameters (b-frames, etc) require the same amount of CPU power to decode. They both make MPEG4 data streams. In fact, most people use one codec to play back both types of streams - for example, use the DivX codec to play DivX and XviD encodes. The only way you would see a noticeable difference would be if one stream had been encoded without b-frames, and the other with b-frames (for example).

I've been running linux for about a year now after having used XP for a couple years. On the same system, they're basically the same speed. There's no noticeable difference in my opinion. I moved to linux for security and stability reasons, but I still use XP on occasion.

dani82
25th September 2005, 08:53
i have the same problem, as far as i know, it's cause my pc on for 12+ hours for encoding, downloading, surfing, and regular usages without giving it a rest

by the time i start watching my anime (before i tun off my pc), i go F*CK!!!, i forgot to give it a rest

GraDy
3rd October 2005, 11:56
ME and 9x suck, simply put. I wouldn't be surprised if moving to a modern OS (Win2k/XP/Linux/*BSD) made a huge difference.

Shinigami-Sama
3rd October 2005, 23:46
ME and 9X are just glorified DOS guis so yeah, move away from those those outdated OSs, unless you also wanna use the PC to play old dos games :D