Your expert opinions please...

[Haywire Lycanthrope]

Ok, so I've got this gimped out comp (735mhz, 384mb pc 100) and I want to be able to properly play movie files and dvd on it. Problem is, it seems to enjoy taunting me by playing the video but being fairly choppy and lousy about it(btw, that 735 is a VIA C3 proc that benchmarks on the level of a 300 celly).

So my question to you is, should I invest in a semi cheap pci vid card in order to take some load off of my cpu so I can watch these vids in peace? There's also a n oldish game that would probably benefit from that aswell, but that's neither here nor there. All witty banter aside, is it a lost cause? Would a card even help? Which card should I get?

Questions demand and answers, and I demand yours.

Thank you.

 

[Mainframeguy]

You do not mention if your Mobo gives you any option for an AGP slot - this would be what is required. I am not sure anything on the PCI is going to help, but I can say I have an old PII with some kind of Apollo AGP card and that does a fair job of playing DVD and movie files, so I think your system could be up to it if you can put in an AGP card - and BTW you do not need to go for anything fancy there - it would be a complete waste to do so, so this will be a cheap upgrade, provided your mobo allows you to make it.

 

[Electronic Punk]

Look for a really old bit of DVD software.
ie WinDVD 3, PowerDVD3, Cinemaster.

 

[logisticprism]

something that performs at a 300 celeron you can't expect to play anything well. i'm not even sure a better vid card could really do much. like EP said, try using somethign old school with low resources, maybe vlc? try closing all other processes (including explorer) and if that doesn't work maybe slapping in a voodoo 3 or an original geforce if you can find either one of those.

 

[Electronic Punk]

I use to use Cinemaster 2000 on my Pentium 2 300, it stuttered a little, but the quality was so much better than my creative dxr2...

 

[Haywire Lycanthrope]

You do not mention if your Mobo gives you any option for an AGP slot - this would be what is required.

Yeah, sorry. I do know that AGP would be the way to go here, but I do not have agp support.

The problem resides more in playing things like windows media video or avi's, files like that. DVD's usually don't give me a ton of problems, but for some reason I just can't get smooth playback on these other types of files, especially when I also run that VobSub program when I try to be an anime nerd.

Thanks for the ideas so far.

 

[dreamliner77]

Think your best bet would be a hardware DVD decoder card. I would imagine you can get one fairly cheap on ebay.

 

[Mainframeguy]

something that performs at a 300 celeron you can't expect to play anything well....

You MAY be right, but I cannot help butting in to mention that my PII 400 MHz (with Apollo AGP graphics card) manages to play DVD's just as well as my AMD XP3000+, infact maybe better for some reason I haven't worked out! Now OK I know Celeron is slower and 300 is only 75% of 400, but I htink it would be doable... I'm not even running old skool program on that, the same PowerDVD 4 as I run on XP, but the old PII is running 98SE.

One thing I did need to do was enable DMA modes on the player.

However, now we know you have no AGP option I think advice may well be this is a lost cause and the machien could be put to better use as a source of parts to make one that fits your needs, maybe?