decrease quality to play on older computer?
 

Hi, I have computer with an AMD-K6/2 500MHz and a SIS-mainboard with a SIS530 videocard onboard.

I know that this is a terrible board as the video prestations are poor.
If I want to play a movie, I have to close all programs, set the priority to high, decrease resolution to 800x600x16 and then hope that the movie will play without a 'shocking' view, or asychone video<->sound.

In divx-player, there is an option that allows to decrease quallity. this works pretty well for me, but only with divx-movies.

Now I'm using BSplayer, and it manage to play most of my movies, but with a lot of them, the sound runs good, but the video gets behind.

Are there any options that I could enable/disable/change to get a better playback. I don't mind if the quallity decreases.

Johan

As far as I experienced, bsplayer is the player that requires the less resources, thus using it is a good first step.

I think you should tweak around the decoder's properties, especially the postprocessing level.
Set it to 0

You may also use ffdshow filter as a decoder, I believe it a better decoder than the divx decoder itself.
It has a nice feature that allows him to set postprocessing level automatically (real time) depending on the available/needed CPU resources.
I use ffdshow + bsplayer on a 460MHz celeron and it usually works okay.
I've read some times that K6/2 are particularly bad at divx decoding though :|

ffdshow automated postprocessing level used more CPU than the fixed one :lol:
Upgrading your SIS530 driver could also be a good idea :D

Do you mean that I should uninstall divx and only install ffdshow (now they both are installed)

Also, In bsplayer, I set postprocessing to the lowest value; in ffdshow, postprocessing isn't checked. should I check it and then set it to the lowest value, or is postprocessing completly disabled if it isn't checked?

I'll try if updating my sis driver helps, but I doubt it, it's just a bad mainboard with an onboard videocard which has shared memory...
I know other computers, with oly a 366MHz cpu, wwith a decent videocard and it works just fine on those comuters.

Thanks for the tips already, I'll let you know if it helps!

HI again, I set the postprocessing to the lowest value and updated my vidieo-drivers.
It runs better now, but the sound is still not synchrone.
is there anything I can do about that, like for example let the sound and video play in such a anynchrone way that it runs synchrone on my computer (but that probably needs more cpu...)

More CPU ???
I'v got PII266 with Intel I740 gfx card and BSPlayer plays 1CD-divx5 compressed movies with about 30-40% CPU usage. No synchronization problems.
I installed NimoCodecPack5 build8 with some directshow filters disabled(TFM, Morgan stream ... , G400, 'subtitle related filters').
FFdshow is fast but it always cause problems on my machine in fulscreen mode.

mmmm,

"I'v got PII266 with Intel I740 gfx card"
thats almost unbelievable

but great for ya !!!

I do think the graphic card is very importand in
smooth playback.