Hi all,

Macs and PCs please... CPU, OS, RAM, etc.; anything that's vital. Also, how important is the video card in the MPEG playback equation? I assume it's probably *the* limiting or enabling factor. Thoughts?

Frank.

-- Frank Marshall (new_wave@one.net.au), July 05, 2000

Answers

P.S. This is for fullscreen VCD playback at 16-bit (True Color)...

-- Frank Marshall (new_wave@one.net.au), July 05, 2000.

Hi Mark,

Don't know about minimum configs, but my machine's close to becoming obsolete and I'm satisfied with VCD playback on it. Mine's a Pentium II 350 MMX with a cheapo 8 meg AGP graphics card.

-- Froilan (fcyy@yahoo.com), July 05, 2000.

Hi Frank, my sister has a Pentium with 120Mhz. I'm not sure what kind of graphics card it has. The VCDs would only work nice (having no droped frames and clear sound) if it was the only thing running. Hope this helps.

-- Jay (jlink84@yahoo.com), July 05, 2000.

Hey Frank, I am able to run VCDs on my old 486SX 25MHz computer using an MPEG decoder card (MPEG1 cards are only about $10 on eBay). The card I am using needs at least a 386/ 33MHz processor. If you just want to use software decoding, then I'd say a Pentium 100MHz with 16MB would do fine for watching it in a window. Maybe a Pentium 133 16MB would be minimum for full screen video with a goood framerate. With the decoder card on my 486, I can use DOS, Win3.1, and Win95. Windows 98 will work fine too.

-- Mr.Ian Roswell (cyberlien51@juno.com), July 06, 2000.

Thanks guys,

I am thinking of software decoding. A friend's 200MMX machine with bags of RAM but a 2MB graphics card couldn't playback my VCD cleanly unless the monitor color-depth was stripped back to 256 colors, otherwise there was weird virtical banding on the video. I saw the same thing on a P166, also with a 2MB card. Any ideas?

Frank.

-- Frank Marshall (new_wave@one.net.au), July 07, 2000.

Must also be related to the software your using, I have and am still running a Cyberlink PowerPlayer that is structured for windows 3.11 and it plays full screen on a 166 with 2M card were media player struggles (it does not play VCD's correctly anyway). The decoder card like the RealMagic Hollywood plus is a great unit as well, it saved my 233mmx from destruction for playing DVD's full screen, no money to Gates if I can help it.

Cheers

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), July 12, 2000.