How much CPU power is needed for DVD use....

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His Royal Majesty King V
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How much CPU power is needed for DVD use....

Post by His Royal Majesty King V »

All,

I'm putting together an old P-II 266MHz for someone.

So, I had a SCSI card and a SCSI DVD player. Now I know DVD decoding requires some fair bit of processing power. I also know that ATI video cards, even older ones, are generally supposed to be good about helping along with it, although I don't know HOW old is too old even for ATI.

So, it's an ATI 8MB Rage 3D Pro Turbo.

My question is: With that videocard and only 266MHz, is a DVD player a waste of time? Or can this thing actually play movies?
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Wiggy
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Post by Wiggy »

You could always get a cheapo DVD decoder card off E-Bay, if it wasn't cutting the mustard.
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Post by Jim »

From my experience, using ATI 7000 AGP cards, a 500Mhz K62 (non +) on a 1 Meg cache Fic VA_503+ mobo will work ok, with no visible jerkiness in the motion. A 550 K62 on a 512K Asus P5A-B board will also work but it will be really borderline, so that you have to use every possible bios tweak to generate a bit more speed, to get the no visible jerkiness effect. The one machine I built with a 233P2 was a complete disaster at playing DVDs, long pauses, audio out of sync with video etc. I do not know what the cache was on the mobo. The machine is long since history. I have also built a couple of 533 Celeron machines that would play DVDs ok. I dont think that the 66Mhz FSB is very condusive to good DVD playback unless you have one of the higher end processors.
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His Royal Majesty King V
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Post by His Royal Majesty King V »

Then I'm thinking the 266 MHz P2 system will also be pretty hopeless.

My K6-2+ and K6-3 sysetms, both with 1MB L3 cache and running 500MHz, should be fine then.

The K6-2+ has a Radeon 7500, though I think I recall that even with the Rage 128 Pro, it played nearly perfectly smoothly.

But I'm figuring maybe I'll just put a CD burner, or maybe a second CD drive, in place of the DVD drive in the 266MHz machine.
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punkrawker82
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Post by punkrawker82 »

My old system played DVD's fine. I don't think the PII 266 will make it without a decoder card though :(
Past System
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Asus P5A-B rev1.05(Beta BIOS 1011.005)
AMD K6-2/CXT AFX @ 500Mhz(CPUCool 5 x 100)
128Mb PC100 SDRAM
VisionTek GeForce 4 MX 440 4x AGP @2x w/ 64Mb DDR
Creative Ensoniq PCI Sound Card
ADS Turbo Quad 4 Port USB PCI Card
Linksys NC100 v2 NIC
Western Digital 8Mb Cache SE 80Gb HD
Lite-On 52x32x52 CDR/RW
Lite-On 16x48 DVD

Current
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Athlon XP-A(Barton) 2600+ @ 1.91Ghz
Abit NF7-S v2.0
512Mb Kingston 3200 DDR(2.5-3-3-7)
VisionTek GeForce 4 MX 440 4x AGP w/ 64Mb DDR
Hotrodk63
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Post by Hotrodk63 »

This really doesn't apply strictly to dvd movie watching, but on my k63+ I found one of the things that suffers the most nowdays was playing encoded movies, mainly divx ones. In my past experience it takes at least 400mhz or better to play either dvds or encoded movies smoothly, 600 mhz or more has no issue at all if not much is running in the background, but skipping from place to place within the movie at least on my system was taking a absurd amount of time on higher resolution divx files. If it helps anyone, I was able to gain a great deal of speed by switching to the newest ffdshow codec, and using zoomplayer to view the movies. One issue I may have is my dismal video card, I do not know how much running a radeon etc would help matters.
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