reducing desktop area

[Batman]

I have an "obsolete" computer. However, I am able to view half-hour or divx clips, when I scale down the screen resolution to 640x320 (this is the minimum screen resolution possible). I would hypothesize, that by further reducing the screen area I might be able to improve divx playback. Is it possible to scale down the resolution even further?

Thanks

[setarip]

You might try reducing the desktop color depth to 256 colors (This only affects the desktop, not the video), which will freeup additional CPU overhead.

Let us know of your success ;>}

[Batman]

Thanks for your reply.

However, the 256 color option, actually results in worse playback, I think it's because, the divx filter requires at minimum 8 bit color. Actually, in one post a person wrote that they were able to improve playback (allow the playback of a complete movie in full screen mode) by decreasing the screen size, to 288x*** on I believe a Pentium 200 laptop? I don't know how they did that, I wonder if that was an option in the "display" of the computer (my minimum is only 640x320) or if they used some other mechanism? I'd like to know if that is plausible on my system (I've got Windows 98 SE)

Thanks

[abdul]

I don't know which player you are using, but you might want to consider radlight player or bsplayer (radlight claims it can play on a 233Mz with 16 ram and a PCI 4 Mb card)

Also (but i'm certainly not telling something new here) make sure to close all apllications which run in the background

[Batman]

Thanks for the reply. I've tried BSPLAYER, that produced a ton of problems. Radlight player isn't much better. I used GDIVX player, it has bugs, but uses less memory than WM 6.4 Currently, I use Yeahplayer, it works good, and isn't as bugged as GDIVX player. I always ensure that nothing is running while I'm playing divx clips. I guess the alternative solution is to convert them to MPEG format, using TMPGENC, but a divx 720 mb movie would take 136 hours on my pC--draining its power supply, and TMPGENC isn't highly stable. Is there anyway, to save a file your encoding and then restart from that point later on? I could I guess use Virtual DUB to split the divx avi, and then convert it in parts. Just out of curiosity, why can't my system handle high divx movies (700 kbps) when it can play back 3999 kbps MPEG files?