Minimum requirements for playing mpg, avi, asf videos?

[KiLLaZ]

I am looking to get an old laptop (from the AT Classifieds of course) to play movies on. Nothing special, just something that will entertain us at work (security desk). I am just curious as to what the minimum requirements are to play mpegs, avis, asfs, etc. I'm looking at some P-100's and P-133's - will those do? Thanks!

 

[Scootin159]

depends on the movie size, quality & codec used. I would reccomend a 500mhz p3-level minumum if you really want to watch movies at a decent frame rate.

 

[Lithium381]

Just for a reference, i'm running an 800mhz Duron w/ 256mb ram.........and i don't see any lag(unless i'm doing something in the background)......yeah, a 500mhz would be the lowest i'd settle for for a video PC

 

[Scootin159]

I have friends with a 450mhz celeron & it gets about 10fps on a good-quality DIVX.

 

[Scootin159]

oh yeah, I forgot to mention that my parents p200 would run .asf cheep quality with some skipping (~10fps), but was about 5 frame per minute on a good DIVX.

 

[Danzilla]

No. You won't be able to do much with an older laptop at those speeds. The speed of the CPU isn't the only factor of course. A lot depends on the rest of your system. Some on-board audio and video systems can use up a good chunk of CPU cycles, not to mention any constant running programs (ie. antivirus). While you can get by with less, I'd suggest about a 600MHz P3 or 800MHz Celeron as basic. If the system is 'clean' (little else taking up CPU time), you can probably get by with about 3/4 of those CPU speeds.

$.02,
D.

 

[Elledan]

450-500 MHz w/ a good videocard should be sufficient.

 

[SendTrash]

my celeron 366 laptop runs mpegs well and asf... but not all divx... but I know from experience that a celeron 466 can play all those formats flawlessly, so you can take that as your base case...

 

[hans007]

avi will play on almost anything, its not compressed much. mpg will play on a p133 fine. asf thats pretty compressed you want aroudn a p2-266 or so for that.

 

[Scootin159]

<< avi will play on almost anything, its not compressed much. >>



It really depends more on the CODEC used in the AVI. Some CODEC's don't have much compression like you say, but DIVX is probably the most compressed CODEC available & it is normally found in AVI files.

 

[KiLLaZ]

So far from the data I've collected, I would need at least a Celly 466 to play DivX encoded avis?

Can I "re-encode" a DivX file into a larger, uncompressed AVI file for play on my future laptop?

If so, I'd probably just get a P133 or P166.

Basically most of the movies I'd want to watch are DivX

 

[kami]

I would get bare minimum 500MHz to watch DivX. Slow computers can handle mpeg's fine, but the more advanced codec require a little horsepower.

 

[Kev]

yoo need like 109 gigobites, and like 100 megahurts. but yoo mite also want to buy a lot of megobits of ram and a "ISP" to play on teh American on line.