what's the minimum I need to run DivX/DVD files??

[darw_n]

HI, I am making a box to go into my entertainment center to play divx files, along with MP3's, and DVD's...

what's the minimum I need to do this well??

thanks

[robomonkey]

From my experiences, any non-celeron or non-k6 series, cpu that runs faster than 400 mhz should work for software dvd playback.
If you get a dvd decoder board, any pentium mmx or higher should work

As for mp3s, the requirements are VERY low. If you box plays dvds, it will play mp3s.

As for divx.....depends if you want to encode them or not. If your looking to encode them, go as fast as you can. If your just looking to play them back, 400mhz would be more than adequate.


Plenty of ram helps too.

[darw_n]

I thought RAM has no play in playback?

or am I thinking of encoding?

and this box is solely for playback, I use the big box for encoding

[robomonkey]

A lot of ram (relatively speaking, say 256 mb) will help system performance immensely. Less swap file swapping by the operating system means better performance. Decoding dvds takes quite a bit of memory bandwith and moves alot of data.

Using a decoder card will take some more load of of the CPU, but i'm not sure if it will help out the memoy situation any. The other benifit to the decoder card, is Dolby Dgital Decoding. OF course, people will tell you that any card in the SBlive/Audigy system will do this for you, and this is true to an extenet. When the SBlive/Audigy series decodes the DD stream, it does it purely in software, not in hardware. So if your doing it on a lower end system, you'd get more benifit from a decoder card. I beleive the performance hit on a higher end system (1 gig athlon) was 3-5%, according to anandtech recent Audigy Review.

For example, I have a box for playing dvds and mp3s hooked up to my stereo. Stats as follows:

asus p5a-b
AMD k6-2 350
2*128mb crucial pc133
maxtor 20gig ata 100 7200rpm
tnt2 ultra 32 mb
sblive value oem
hollywood plus dvd decoder card
sony 5x dvd drive
3com 905b nic


The DVD decoder and the extra 128mb or ram make all the difference in this systems performance, especially since I put win2k on it and started using it as a light webserver in addition to playing DVDs and mp3s (im in a dorm room.)


Good luck.