Range of lower end machines playing soft dvd smoothly

[Deanodarlo]

I am trying to find a general range of hardware that achieves the minimum spec for smooth software dvd playback.

Please can people post their machine and software info here if your happily playing dvds on an older software-decoding computer.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Deano.

 

[Duvie]

My new machine t-bird 750 plays it smoothly even without radeons help...

My old machine a amd k6-2 400 w/ voodoo 3 2000 and 192mb pc-100 ram could not play it smoothly...very jerky...if you scanned or chapter searched could get the audio unsynched with picture. I threw in an old cinemaster dvd decoder card and it was perfect.

I would assume anything less than a p3 600 or amd duron 600 (due to its high fsb) could hamper smooth playback...Also lower speed even if it plays dvd's may be limited in multitasking operations, and requiring you to shut down many programs in the background to give it the necessary cpu usage.

This is ofcourse my own theory, since having a dvd-rom back in 1997 with a p-pro 200. (never tried soft decoding on that machine)

 

[rbV5]

Smooth as silk here

WMP 6.4, and the ATI cinemaster software, work great.

 

[jmorrell]

PERFECT playback on a K6-2+/550 with an ATI Rage Fury Pro, Pioneer 10X slot load DVD ROM, Soundblaster Live MP3+ 5.1, and Cambridge DTT2200 5.1 speakers with ATI DVD Player 3.2 software.

 

[madthumbs]

I get occasional jerkiness, but I think it is the DVD drive that I bought "out of box" at a PC fair for $60. Or it's the Voodoo 5.

 

[DerProfi]

I built a BookPC (which uses the infamous integrated i810 graphics) for a buddy a few months ago with a whopping Celeraon 300, 96MB of RAM, 2x DVD drive and Win98SE. With PowerDVD 3.0 its DVD playback was actually watchable, much to my surprise.