Looking for a good, very lightweight DVD player software

Discuss software and how to tweak more performance out of your system.
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His Royal Majesty King V
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Looking for a good, very lightweight DVD player software

Post by His Royal Majesty King V »

All,

Okay, well, I still use the K6-2+ and K6-III systems, and they've got ATI cards in 'em, so I think I get some hardware help from the vidcards.

Still, I'm looking for a good, solid, reliable DVD player software. Ideally the player itself should take up as little in terms of memory usage and CPU cycles as possible, because I guess I'll need every last spare MHz I've got to do the actual DVD decoding.

I have ATI's version 4.1, but it doesn't seem to like newer DVDs (It's fine with "Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure", but it doesn't get anything other than sound, and SOME of the menu items for "The Mummy")

The later versions require some weird aspect of Win98's desktop to be there. Since I use 98lite, I've got the 95 desktop, and want to keep it that way.

Any thoughts or suggestions?
FIC PA-2103 E-O036, K6-2+ 450 2.0V @ 500 1.9V
FIC PA-2013 E-O036, K6-III 450 2.2V @ 500
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Super_Relay
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Post by Super_Relay »

you might try one of the older versions of windvd and use dvdgenie to tweak it

windvd 2000 or somthing like that

i think dvd genie has some tweaks for powerdvd as well.

basically dvdgenie lets you customise playback quality and hardware acceleration features in much greater detail than any of the dvd player programs will let you.

dvdgenie link: http://www.inmatrix.com/genie/
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Post by Jim »

I have ATI's DVD players, WinDVD4, and PowerDVD3, 4, and 5. ATI's DVD players suck. Probably the best of those I have is PowerDVD 4. Newer versions do not allow one at a time frame advance , so you cannot capture a complete sequence of frames with power DVD 5. And thanks for the tip, Super Relay, will look into that site.

Edit: Just so there is no misunderstanding, newer versions of PowerDVd do have a frame advance feature; but it has been my experience that it works erratically. What happens is instead of consistantly advancing 1 frame, it advances anywhere from 1 to 3 frames.
Last edited by Jim on Mon Feb 21, 2005 6:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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His Royal Majesty King V
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Post by His Royal Majesty King V »

Are these generally available for free, or at some cost?

(I should probably just do a search and start really looking for them, but I'm lazy!)
FIC PA-2103 E-O036, K6-2+ 450 2.0V @ 500 1.9V
FIC PA-2013 E-O036, K6-III 450 2.2V @ 500
Acer quasi-proprietary Mid-tower, P-II 266
Jim
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Post by Jim »

Of the ones that I have, Power DVD 4 and 5 came bundled with my LG DVD players. Power DVD 3, I bought for 10 bucks in a sick bird fashion. (Said right on the disk was supposed to be bundled with player.) The Win DVD 4 came bundled with a Power Colour (ATI) 7000 AGP card. Suspect that you can find a shop that will part with a disk for about 10 bucks. If you can't ; I can, and mail it to you.
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smoke
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Post by smoke »

Try VLC media player. It does come with a mpeg2 decoder so it will play DVDs right off the bat, and it is free.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Guest

Post by Guest »

here is also a mpeg2 decoder download for free...

http://www.elecard.com/download/
Guest

Post by Guest »

or... even better use a ffdshow alpha build with also mepg2 support...
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AlleyViper
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Post by AlleyViper »

Use media player classic and enable every video hardware acceleration you can. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... e_id=84358
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tazwegion
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Post by tazwegion »

I d/l'ed a freeware DVD player package once (desperately trying to remember) and due to copyright etc. it didn't include the required codecs (availability may have changed now) so I pursued a copy of winDVD and installed that also (primarily for the codecs) and the freeware player worked better on my then OC'ed K62-500@560Mhz & TnT2pro than either powerDVD OR winDVD...

I also recall a sound quality issue with ISA sound cards... but PCI were fine :banana


EDIT:

The name of the wonderful freeware was MaXimus DVD it's 4.67MB file can be downloaded from HERE :D
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Jim
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Post by Jim »

@ TAZ : How do you do that ? What ? Insert links using what you want; e.g." Here". Me I can barely manage to get to a site let alone a page, let alone change the link from a mile of gobbledegook into something useful.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
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SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
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tazwegion
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Post by tazwegion »

@ Jim... easy use the tags like so... [code] [URL=gobblede ... _here]HERE

[/code]

I code all my posts by hand (yes even the emoticons)... and I do it 'that' way because I can't abide hugely long 'url address strings' as they make the thread look untidy :lol: :P
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Jim
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Post by Jim »

Thanks. Still my education continues. Will try that to see if I can get it to work. Expect to pestered again if not.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
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tazwegion
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Post by tazwegion »

LMAO :lol: that's what we're here for Jim ;)

Yeah so anyway KingV MaXimusDVD v1.2 was a wee little ripper, with virtually little/no flutter (unlike other DVD software I wont mention :P)... I haven't gone back to it since though I must admit, I've now got far more powerful systems and they run 'whateverDVD' nicely :)
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His Royal Majesty King V
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Post by His Royal Majesty King V »

Cool, thanks for the info and update of this long-dormant thread.

Sorry I haven't been posting regularly guys. The move and new job took a bit out of me, and we still haven't finished unpacking! Both the wife and I pretty much spent the first month or so in the new house with nasty respiratory infections.

But I still stop in to look in the spare minute here or there.... just haven't had time to really sit down and say a lot (or update the compatibility list....)
FIC PA-2103 E-O036, K6-2+ 450 2.0V @ 500 1.9V
FIC PA-2013 E-O036, K6-III 450 2.2V @ 500
Acer quasi-proprietary Mid-tower, P-II 266
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