Smooth DIVX and DVD playback, HOW??

[BDSM]

I am using a Creative Tnt 2 ultra with tv-out. I download and watch alot of divx movies.
My question is: Would a Geforce or Radeon based gfx card give me smoother playback? Some of the movies I download chop. In some cases the encoding is badly done and therefore to blame but some seem to play smoother on my friends puter. He uses a gf3 card.
And his processor is faster. I use a celeron 1100mhz processor on an Asus Cusl2 mobo. My friend has an athlon t-bird @ 1533mhz on an Abit kg7 mobo.

Is the extra processing power helping him to get smoother playback somehow? Cpu usage newer exceeds 70 % for me but.. but....

I also read somewhere that higher bus speed helps improve smoothness.. Any truth to this?

Someone also said that some mobo's give choppy video. And that the CUSL2 was one of them. Is this true?

Also.. which card gives the best picture quality on video, and with tv-out?

 

[Dazex]

Hi BDSM,
With the video card that you have, I would say that DVD and Divx ;-) playback would be more dependent on CPU speed than anything else. I am currently running a Matrox G400Max with SBLive, AOpen DVD drive and a CUSL2 and 700MHz EB processor (on both Win2k and WinXP). Divx ;-) movies and DVD playback runs perfectly for me with no noticeable drop frame whatsoever. Because of this, I never bothered to check CPU utilization and the DVDMax capability looks great outputted to TV (make sure to adjust output contrast and brightness for optimal picture quality with the Matrox cards).

I would check to make sure DMA is enabled on your HD and DVD drive.

Maybe others on this forum can give additional insight. I just wanted to relay my experiences with a system which I think may be compareable to yours to hopefully help you out.

 

[KokomoGST]

Well, I had a system similar to yours, I frequently messed with my CPUclock settings on my P3-750@500-975. I was using a GF256 on the machine, but like Dazex said, it's not your vidcard. Check your Divx filter quality settings, mess around with them and see if that's not the culprit. Also, more RAM in the system really does help... but yeah, it may even be the version of your Divx codec as well. There's lots of factors, if it's not much of a difference, I wouldn't agonize over it.

A GF or Radeon based card would off-load some of the work off the CPU, but it not too much of a concern with your fast proc.

 

[BDSM]

Thanx both of you. Dazex: yes.. the g400's DVD-max feature is nice. However it has a FAT ASS flaw if you live in Europe. That is if you use NTSC media (most of the stuff I download is) it will drop a cool five frames a second. So it's pretty much unusable for me since I am in europe.
I know this for sure cuz I have one in a closet somewhere.1

Anyhow.. I just installed the latest Divx codec (4.12)

I'm gonna upgrade both cpu, memory and gfx card anyway. It can't hurt, right?

 

[randomlinh]

yeah, can't hurt.. but if you wanna save a little money, try a clean install and see how things go.. but if you're upgrading anyway.. go for it.

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

i was kinda surprised at how good my gf2pro was at DVD and DIVX decoding. Right up their with the radeon's. I suggest, if u are planning on upgrading ur video card, to go get a gf2 ti200 and you'll be pleasantly surprised with the result.s

 

[Auric]

I cannot speak to any possible defects in that mainboard but otherwise there is no reason a C1100 should not have more than enough oomph and as you say processor usage never approaches full (as expected). The NVIDIA cards are not known for good video scaling or TVO but that is seperate from dropping frames. As said, some encodes are simply crap. You can confirm whether any frames are skipped by viewing the stats in mplayer. If there is something wrong with the mainboard then an even peppier CPU ain't gonna help. If you have a hope then it is either a software problem or the TNT. I would replace it anway. Radeon unquestionably has superior 2D/video/TVO but if you are keen on Geforce then at least it will be an improvement on the TNT in some respects and should at confirm where the problem lies one way or the other.