best media player for slow pc's

[olabri]

Hi i have a 450 MHz (with 512 MB ram) PC that i have silenced and am using as a playback-machine in my living room. OS is winXP SP1 and it is pretty much maximum trimmed for performance.

However, it is a bit tight in specs for playing DivX and other video formats, and I often find that the players I use cause lagging of sound or picture. When using same player/codec on my fast machine i find no synch problems.

Also some players work better than others. The Core Player is the best i've tried, but it isn't perfect, so my question is:

-which media player delivers best quality per CPU perfomance?

thanks

Olav Bringedal

[setarip]

Try the ever-popular, efficient, low overhead, Windows Media Player v.6.4 (Desktop>>Start>>Run>>type MPLAYER2.EXE)

[Toast B|M]

I have a same kinda machine that i gave to my sis for her school work, i have played divx/xvid movies on it and it works just as fine using wmp 6.4,so i will second what setarip said above because wmp is not resource hungry and serves the purpose just right.

[olabri]

thx for the tip, i thought MS had stopped distributing that one

and it even works better when i increase its base- priority to "above normal"!

[setarip]

"thx for the tip"

My (Our) pleasure ;>}

[olabri]

Fullscreen vs window

Hi

I have still some performance problems on my PC.


What seem to happen is that every time i use fullscreen, the decoder (ffdshow) starts to screw up things. Picture lags behind and suddenly jumps several seconds ahead to sync again. When running in a window it runs smoothely. This goes for all players.

So i'm thinking: is there a way to force fullscreen to run at lower resolution in the different players. I found a way in bs player, but that one more often than not have problems with xvid.

Or even better (since i run XP on a TV) to reduce the overall reolution in windows to 640*480 like in the good old days?

card: ati rage 128

[Enchanter]

Your ATI Rage card is the weakest link here. Replacing it with any current low-budget cards will help boost performance.

[olabri]

by using the xp compability wizard i was able to get 640*480 res, but still ffdshow reports a framerate of 9-14 fps in fullscreen.

even though i got an old video card, it should be capable of more than that?

Can it be its tv-out that slows it?
It ran like a dream on a 19" monitor with 1280*1024 res.

any ideas on how to look for bottlenecks?

[Enchanter]

Originally posted by olabri

even though i got an old video card, it should be capable of more than that?

I know of a system that used the same video chipset, but faster processor (667MHz). It did not produce good performance in video playback but upon replacing the video adapter with a good Geforce2 MX, everything ran happily ever since...

[Batman]

Reduce colourdepth to 16 bit, and desktop area to 640x480. Turn off any post processing, and then try BSPLAYER.