DIVX Questions Part II: Computer good enuff?

[scarfase99]

Ok, well, here's my second issue i'm having with DIVX movies. All the movies play fine on my Athlon XP 1800+ and GeForce3 TI 200 card, windows XP. Here's the machine i've set up as my divx box:

AMD K6-2 500
384mb SDRAM
4gb HD
Matrox G450 AGP 16mb Vid Card Dual Display
6X SCSI Plextor
24X IDE CD-Rom
WindowsXP

Now, i usually use PowerDVD to play my movies and that's the best player i've been able to find, however, on some of my higher quality DIVX movies it's choppy. Even when i copy it to the HD it's still choppy and the audio's way ahead of the video. (i tested the movie on my Fast Machine & it played perfectly) So the question is, what's causing the problem? the CPU? the Video Card? WindowsXP?
Is there a better player out there that'll reduce the choppiness? (I've tried the Playa, WMP, PowerDVX)

thanks in advance

 

[Luden]

I'd try to put your gf3 in your divx machine and see if it helps

 

[MulLa]

I think DivX is mainly CPU limited changing graphics card shouldn't help that much. Hey I've seen a PII 350 machine with an ATI 8mb card play DivX without any problems. Not sure what you mean by high quality Divx tho.

 

[Vernor]

There's no hardware acceleration for divx.

Anyway, you should be using The Playa for it.

 

[Rankor]

Only tips I can provide is to make sure all drives are on DMA mode.

Your hardware setup is more than enough to play DivX. I was able to get DivXs playing on a iPentium 200 MMX and a 2 MB 2D card with only 16 MB of RAM.

You might want to check the CPU (Quality) value and probably lower it to the lowest (1 instead of 4). Thats located under File/Properties/Advanced/DivX MPEG-4 DVD Video Decompressor in WMP 6.4.

 

[Engr62]

Something else you might want to check... what is the vertical resolution of your DivX movies that are choppy? Is it greater than about 272 (i.e., 576x432)?

I have an old computer system hooked up to my TV so that I can play DivX movies on my TV. My specs are:

Processor: K6-2 450+
Video: Radeon 32 Mb SDR PCI
Memory: 256 Mb
CD-ROM: 36x
Hard drive: Seagate 1.6 Mb (slow drive)
OS: Windows 98SE
Player: Windows Media Player, v. 6.4 (I also use the BS Player for the chapter feature)

I noticed that when I played any movie that had an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 (640x272), the movie would play fine. However, if I played anything with a vertical resolution over 272 (like a movie with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio ripped at 576x432), the movie would play very choppy. To test this out, I resized a DivX movie from 640x352 to 512x272 (approx. 1.85:1 aspect ratio) using VirtualDub. After resizing, the movie played fine on this system.

I then checked out how the movies played on my daughter's computer (K6-2 450 non-plus)--same results: anything I had over 272 vertical resolution would play choppy, but below that would play fine. On my main system (P3-600eb), everything plays smoothly. I tried overclocking my 450+ system to 600 Mhz (because the K6-2 plus chips are fairly overclockable), but this didn't seem to help. So, maybe there is something about the floating point of the processor that DivX uses that won't allow the K6-2's to perform very well.

Hope this helps.

 

[scarfase99]

Ok, since i'm using WindowsXP, it uses WMP 7.0. Does any1 know how to adjust CPU or DIVX Usage on that? Is there a program that'll do it? I've tried playing with the Playa and it's very unstable. PowerDVD had been giving me the best performance. BTW, any1 think that using WindowsXP is causing problems? I turned off all the extra details.

lmk
thanks again fellaz

btw, when i say high quality, i mean DVD Rips that take up a full 700MB CD

 

[DanFungus]

I'll try playing a DivX movie on my Pentium 166, 128MB SIMMs, Voodoo3 3000 and see how it is...

 

[DanFungus]

well, I can't try it on my slow computer, because the movie is on my better computer, and the hard drive only has 223MB free space on it (a 1.5GB drive that a friend gave me), so no luck in copying a 600MB movie to test

 

[Mingon]

Their is a hardware divx encoder which is now becoming available which looks good or alternatively get the Archos multi-media player, I know I am going to

 

[scarfase99]

do you know the name of the hardware divx encoder? or anything that'll help?

 

[Maetryx]

Given the release of DivX5 today, the question above this deserved a bump. Is there really a DivX hardware encoder?

 

[Superwormy]

www.sdesigns.com will be offering a hardware Divx 4 decoder soon with TV-out on board, a la the Hollywood DVD+ card they now offer for DVD / MPEG2 playback...