Low Spec Player

[Dak]

I have an old PC which I was going to use as my DivX player. It's not up to much (P2, 230Mb RAM, etc) but I though it would be fine playing films as it has a TV out on the GFX card.

My problem is that when the camera pans quickly in the film I get horizontal lines in the film like the screen update isn't quick enough. I don't get these flickers when I play them on my PC (XP2200, 1GB RAM, Geforce4) so I can only assume it's the hardware.

What I was wanting to ask is if there is a DivX player app which would overcome this problem by doing something like caching the film into memory before firing it at the video card to try to reduce the update issues. Basically, what would be the best player to use on a low spec machine.

Also would the OS make a difference - I've tried Win2K and Win98 and it happened in both - or is there anything else I can do to help reduce this issue.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Cheers, Dak.

[DAvenger]

Hello,

Well, something like that would be very hard to do and I doubt it would have some effect on the performance at all :rolleyes:

P2 should be capable to handle DivX movies without any problems ... but this depends mostly on the graphics card (and drivers :) )

Maybe our new XVR renderer could help ... the CPU usage is approx. 10-25% lower than the default Microsoft Video renderer, this makes it perfect for low end systems. However, it sometimes (on older cards) gives not so good results :(

DAvenger

[Blight]

Dak:
What you're describing sounds like tearing caused by low refresh rate, even older cards should support 100hz refresh rates, so try raising the refresh rate to the max the card/monitor can support.

[Dak]

Blight,

Thanks for this advice - I am pushing the video out to a TV through a phono socket so does this still apply?

[Blight]

It doesn't apply, but it means those tearing are due to crappy tv-out not matching the video refresh rate to the tv refresh rate.

[OvERaCiD23]

Could they be artifacts from the IDCT routine? Certain IDCTs can produce artifacts like what you're talking about (can't be certain w/o seeing them though). I've never been able to notice the horizontal lines on my monitor (LCD), but can on my crappy TV. maybe try to download the ffdshow playback filter and play around with the IDCT routines to see if you can cure the problem.

https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=53761

download the newest alpha version, i've yet to encounter any problems with it, and it fixed a couple issues i was having with my video card.

[Yusaku]

This looks like it could be a graphics card problem - your driver/hw probably doesn't support VSync. I had at lest one card in the past (Riva 128, Riva TNT1) where I could not get the VSync to work no matter what I tried. Try looking for some utilities to enable VSync on your card in DShow apps, dig in registry... or if you see matrox dualhead card somewhere for cheap, go for that :)