I have a Pentium II 333MHz and I have been mucking around with some DVD Software on it atm.

I actually have a Creative DXR3 DVD Decoder card but I'm not a fan of the loop back cable. It was all and good when I ran my old 17 inch CRT monitor at 800x600 but now that I have a 19inch LCD monitor it just can't cut the mustard. It's just too blurry!

My 2nd dilemma is I have a 3dfx Voodoo 4 so its ability to accelerate DVD is minimal.

So I went on the hunt to see if I could find a DVD program that would run sufficiently on my system basically just using the CPUs grunt (or lack off).




I have tried:

Media Player Classic - (with and without ffdshow) Runs but it has sound glitches and slight jerkiness throughout playback

Mplayer - Just can't get it to run stably. (probably because you are meant to compile it for your exact system. I can't be bothered)

PowerDVD 4 - Runs but glitches in sound and video playback

Lalim DVD Player 1.02 - This little 716kb player almost manages to achieve it. Again just a few little sound clicks and jerks. So close!!!
http://www.geocities.com/lalimdvdplayer/index.html

PowerDVD 1.5 Trial - Seems to work!!! Wow. PowerDVD 1.5 manages to display a fullscreen movie without a problem (as long as 2 channel audio is selected)!. The problem is... how the hell do I get a full version of it?
Trial Still Available from: http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=powerdvd





So PowerDVD 1.5 proves it is possible by using older DVD software. The question is... where do you get older (legal) versions of full copies from?

And why do newer versions of the programs require so much more processor grunt?



What have you found to be the fastest DVD programs for older systems, and if you can point me in the right direction it would be much appreciated.

Have you tried VLC?

As for PowerDVD, you can always try e-mailing/calling the company. If not that, than I'm sure you can Google up some places where you can find a serial code. I'm sure I even know of a few places, but that's getting into a subject this board most likely doesn't condone

I found I had an old OEM cdrom with PowerDVD 3.0 on it.
It works ok. The video is slightly jittery but the sound playback is smooth.


Trying to avoid legal issues, a serial isn't as much a problem as finding the full version of the older programs.


Why would VLC be a good choice?

It's similar to Mplayer, as in that all of the codecs it uses are internal, but it's not as big of a hassle

You can try the portable version without installing it: http://portableapps.com/apps/music_video/vlc_portable

Thanks I will give it a go

Try KM Player

what about dvdplay.exe, something to do with wmp6.4 theres stuff about it at mdgx.com

You are not going to find a miracle application that is going to play DVD smoothly on a 333Mhz computer IMO.

VLC and KM Player both had playback glitches (mostly in the sound).


I used the registry tweak to allow Media Player 6.4 to play DVD's, it used the PowerDVD 3.0 decoder it appears but struggled to display a smooth image and sound. Interesting. The same codec but worse performance.

Ye of little faith!


PowerDVD 3 works almost perfect though with CPU usage of 90%, PowerDVD 1.5 trial is a touch lower at around 85% (if only I could find a full version)


Yet to test the older WinDVD formats (also hard to find)

Opening a church anytime soon ?

i remember playing vob files with amovie.ocx, it would use the powerdvd codecs again i expect

You won't! Cyberlink has dropped support for version 3 and lower and it's impossible to find it on ebay/online stores.
But you know, you virtually have the full version...

The Win9x Congregation!






Can anyone tell me why playing a dvd causes hard disk activity?

My hard disk light is constantly flashing throughout playback. I thought it might be to do with accessing virtual memory, but my system has 256MB of ram and with the DVD running there is still plenty of free RAM available.

I thought this might be because of the way Win98SE handles memory allocation but I experience the same thing in WinXP.

If I could get it to stop constantly accessing the Hard Disk I might just free up come cpu cycles allowing me to have stutter free play back.

http://www.freeweb.hu/doscdroast/dvd4dos.htm

This might help It isn't really working but - providing info about the existence of something like this...

Wow!
Low system requirments!

Minimal requirements:

-486DX computer (486 with built-in FPU)
-4/8/16 or more MB of RAM (I don't know...I have 64MB...)
-SVGA card (640x480 resolution and 8/15/16/24/32 color bits/pixel)
-SB Pro or compatible soundcard (11025 Hz, 8 bit, stereo)
-DVD drive with drivers installed (CDROM.SYS included in the package)
-a single layer and region-free DVD movie disc
-lots of spare time because DVD4DOS Beta1 is not a realtime player
and very slow...(tested with my Pentium 120 MHz computer...
transcoding 1 min movie takes cca. 1 hour)











I have been trying to modify my DVD-ROM read ahead cache to see if that makes a difference.

First I set it none. Tested and Later used Cacheman 5.50 to set it to 4638kb .

Performance was bad with it set to none, but I couldn't tell any difference between 4638kb and the standard setting of 1238kb's.

Cacheman says the following:



What disk cache settings would then be best for DVD playback?

Does anybody have the trial versions of WinDVD 2000 and/or PowerDVD 2.55 that they can send me?

Have you tried using the Fraunhoffer DVD codecs ?

Yep. I had Media Player Classic using them.


What I don't understand is currently I have MPC using PowerDVD 3's codec but PowerDVD 3 can play the files so much better than MPC can.
Does that mean the program overheads of MPC are higher than PowerDVD 3?

Which version of MPC you're using?
If 6.4.9.0 you could try latest beta from here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=205650

Are you sure it's the harddisk light? It could be the IDE light also, marking the DVD activity.

The light doesn't synchronise with the DVD activity light.

After some reading online I now think dvd programs cache the data to disk before reading it. I wonder if I could optimise that so the program buffers further ahead. Anyone used DVDIdle with good results on slower systems?



I am using Media Player Classic 6.4.9.1

Testing with cacheman again I noticed my Paging File (Virtual Memory Swap File) jumps by 18MB when I start playing a dvd with MPC and Lalim DVD player.


Currently I have ConservativeSwapfileUsage=0 (off)


might retry it with ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 (on)





Edit: PowerDVD 3 does not seem to increase the paging file size. Maybe this explains its higher performance?

Here you have the last free version of Zoom Player with DVD support (around 2002). It's only an advanced front end for whatever DVD playback filters you have installed though but it might be helpfull.

http://rapidshare.com/files/78509492/zoomp...r_2.90.exe.html

No matter how hard I try, it's almost impossible to find old PowerDVD versions than aren't on oldversion.com or oldapps.com.
Good luck finding v2.5. The 2.5 to 2.55 patch is avaible but that's all.

Anyway, after a long search, I still managed to find the trial of what's supposed to be version 2.0915. Here you go: ftp://195.228.240.135/pub/multimedia/egye...d20915trial.exe

Thanks glock, I will give it a try.


I tried Zoom player and it is on par with MPC. Still not as good as PowerDVD 3.

I can't distinguish and performance difference between PowerDVD 2 trial and PowerDVD 3. Both play ok.

PowerDVD 3 has the edge on picture quality however.

Hmm ... Try to set HIGH priority for your DVD player's process. There are plenty of tools, that capable of this under 9x. TaskInfo98 for example. Try it on Lalim DVD Player or PowerDVD 3, they seems to be most fast players as I can see from your posts.

Try Gom Player.
Also you could try ffdshow-tryouts as an update to the old ffdshow.

The IDE light should flash even when the system reads from the cache integrated in the DVD drive, even if the drive isn't spinning.