Need your recommendations for a slow machine.
 

Hi, I am trying to optimize DivX 5 playback for a slow machine.

Luckily I have bumped into BSplayer, which I heard helps a lot (haven't had the chance to try it yet)

Right now with the Divx Player, scenes with a lot of motion are extremely choppy; post processing quality is set to minimum, as well as effects.

Lots of free ram, minimal backgroudn processes, no distributed computing projects.

Resolution is 640x480 at 16bit colour.

Anyways, does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks!

The person above forgot to mention that he also has a decent directx/directdra video card with proper drivers installed.

The person above forget to mention what CPU does he/she have. Because this is the most important thing. But I did get verry good results using ffdshow on machines running win 98 on K6-II@450 or 500 MHz on 800x600@16

Whoops.

The CPU in question is a K6-2 450; the OS is WinME w directx9.0b; Geforce3ti500.

Using the latest BSplayer and ffdshow 20031128 (latest?) yields seemingly better results in terms of smoothness, but the video lags behind and is far out of sync with the audio! With the Divx codec+player, it would at least keep in sync even though it would be extremly choppy in scenes with a lot of motion.

How did you get your K6-2 to playback so well? Configuration settings? older codec versions?

Thanks!

First I suggest to downgrade to bsplayer 0.86 build 501 who is less resource-consummer. Second, try to minimize postprocessing setings. Something is still strange on your machine, because most of the video files i've seen run on this machine without any lag. What mainboard do you have ? Hope is not an Ali. I've seen some of those and I coulden't get them to work properly.

Will give the player a try.

I am running a Via-MVP3, the Epox variety actually... quite popular for its time; with the version 4-in-1 drivers recommended for 9x systems.

The downfall of this board is that it has 512k level 2 cache, meaning that 128megs of a possible 256megs of ram is cached;

This possibly why it is performing so poorly...

I am going to make Windows see only 128 megs of ram, and see if this actually improves my speed...

I would use the additional uncached 128megs as a ramdrive/pagefile, BUT windows ME does not support that, because they got rid of the dos startup files at bootup...

Lets just say everything that could possibly go wrong, has gone wrong on this system...

I struggled for 8 hours troublshooting bluescreen instability after a fresh install... It turned out the CPU was overclocked without enough voltage that was causing the instability... BUT the bios reported the improper clock speed so I had no way of knowing... I went through just about everything else before I started looking at the jumpers in detail...

Thanks again.

Hmm... should I enable "use overlay" in BSplayer options?

I don't know what "use overlay" is but it sounds like something that could robb me of some performance.

Ok. tried it all.

still audio sync problems D:

First of all, P5MVP3 VIA can handle 256 MB of ram with no problem. It is true I have tested this only on Lucky-Tech motherboards, verry popular in my country, but I am sure it works on other MB. But you must use double sided modules. Second, the L2 cache in fact does help you , especialy on multimedia tasks. Be sure you enabled the cache. Third, AFAIK, K6II@450 runs ok @500. Fourth, check if you have a jumper that selects memory frequency from 66 (default) to 100 MHz (fsb speed). And be sure you use at least PC 100 memory modules. Overlay takes a bit of the presure from the CPU and moves it to the videocaed. To be sure what CPU do you have, take down the cooler and read what is written over there. Normaly K6II@450 runs at 4,5x100 MHz. On the CPU it must be specified 100.

Yeah, MVP3 based boards support up to 768 megs of ram as far as I know.

BUT, the amount cacheable is based on the amount of level 2 cache. This is because it is based on the P5 architechture. 512k cache enables 128 to be cached (used efficiently) 1 meg is 256, etc.

While uncached ram is less efficient, it is better than accessing the swapfile on ones hard dirve of course.

Heh, the processor is a 350. I had to run it at 3.1v (normal is 2.2). Luckily the heatsinks have improved a lot since the K6-2 days.

Anyways, thanks for your help. I am putting together a Celeron 1 ghz for the purpose. This machine will now become my nostalgic Action Quake2 Server.

Celeron 10x100 works fine 10x133 !!!

Heh. It's actually a celeron 600 (66 x 9) @ 112 x 9

you should use overlay. with overlay the vga card will be processing video, not the CPU! thats exactly what you need!

I have "overlay mixer" enabled. Do I also need to have the subgroup "overlay" checked off?

thanks.

Just overlay, mode 1, without overlay mixer should be enough.

Ok, I'm confused. The only two overlay options are these two:
http://members.rogers.com/mlamw555/images/overlay1.jpg
http://members.rogers.com/mlamw555/images/overlay3.jpg
http://members.rogers.com/mlamw555/images/overlay2.jpg
...and it says that the 2nd overlay option can be enabled if overlay mixer is enabled.

whats is overlay "mode 1" ?

thanks.

I was talking about BSPlayer not about ffdshow.

I have the same problem!!!
I have a Pentium 3 800Mhz 128 mbRAM with direct8.0 support.
What should i do?
Thanks

It sounds like to me you don't have enough ram. Perhaps hard drive cache thrashing is causing slow performance.