Are they smooth when played at 1:1 resolution? You would probably need the playback software to utilize hardware video scaling for it to scale and play smoothly. And that could be low quality on Neomagic.

Are you trying to play videos off of a CD? Do they play any better if copied to the hard drive?

Also something of that speed - make sure there is next to nothing running in the background- meaning toolbars, antivirus etc

Does the video adapter have proper drivers insalled? Make sure it doesn't just say "standard vga adapter " because that would mean no hardware acceleration of anything on its side of things

CPU, Cache, Ram quantity, disk cache and your video card / drivers all affect this.

A slow video card, inadequate ram and any number of things affect playback.

My issue historically was a cd-rom that would spin up and down

Hi, thanks for all the answers. No matter the files are on CD drive or the harddrive the playback results always the same, but i always copy the whole CD to harddrive for better performance / less buffer between videos.

I installed Windows Media Player 6 just few minutes ago, this player has hardware acceleration option under the settings, when the acceleration is turned off the video resolution are sharp (same as display res) but the playback frame rate is choppy, when the acceleration is set to full the playback is very smooth but the resolution is bad, maybe just half of the display resolution itself.

Isn't that Pentium 166 alone should be able to play VCD videos just fine without acceleration? Maybe this windows 98SE put to much resources to the CPU?.

swaaye wrote on 2024-12-15, 22:41:

Are they smooth when played at 1:1 resolution? You would probably need the playback software to utilize hardware video scaling for it to scale and play smoothly. And that could be low quality on Neomagic.

Yes, this thing has Magicgraph 128ZV controller, maybe it's just the low quality low resolution nature of Neomagics?, will updating the display driver solve the problem?

The 128ZV apparently has "colour space conversion" and "interpolation" features... that was about it for video acceleration at the time. It should play fine.

I've got a 385ED, which is more or less the same thing as a 380ED, down to the same screen, cpu and vga parts.... I'll have to see if I can check playback on there. I guess the Win 95 "Weezer" video would be a reasonable comparison?

Here's my 385ED playing back some of the MPEG1 samples from the Windows 98 cd.

Same specs as the 380ED:

- 166MMX
- Neomagic 128ZV
- DSTN screen (so most of the blurry mess is accounted for by that!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLDWQuq756M

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-12-16, 09:51:

Here's my 385ED playing back some of the MPEG1 samples from the Windows 98 cd. […]
Show full quote

Here's my 385ED playing back some of the MPEG1 samples from the Windows 98 cd.

Same specs as the 380ED:

- 166MMX
- Neomagic 128ZV
- DSTN screen (so most of the blurry mess is accounted for by that!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLDWQuq756M

Your playback seems far much sharper than mine, my playback is like someone put an opaque filter to the entire video.

Here's my sample, encoded straight from DVD to MPEG1 VCD :

https://youtu.be/qYxyOzSuA-o?si=f_1r93hdu3r0C3_f

Yeah, that's really awful!

My guess is there's something wrong with the driver or the OS, i might try reinstalling the Windows first then check the driver, if it's still not work then this laptop will belong to the dumpster for second time 🧝.

What if you use an old VLC, like 0.8.6f?

bakemono wrote on 2024-12-16, 14:32:

What if you use an old VLC, like 0.8.6f?

Good idea, i will try that later this day.

Do you have DMA enabled?

bakemono wrote on 2024-12-16, 14:32:

What if you use an old VLC, like 0.8.6f?

i always scratch my head whenever vlc is suggested for performance reasons....

leileilol wrote on 2024-12-17, 06:02:

bakemono wrote on 2024-12-16, 14:32:

What if you use an old VLC, like 0.8.6f?

i always scratch my head whenever vlc is suggested for performance reasons....

Older versions of VLC were not that great on the performance front, to put it mildly.

@FireBallMaxx The scaling looks like nearest neighbor interpolation. It's fast and it causes lots of aliasing. What color depth are you running?

I had a Dell Latitude LM with P133 MMX and Neomagic way back. It's a fine chip for running office software but that's about all. DOS will look like this too if you set it to full screen, because until ATI Rage Mobility, there was no bilinear resolution scaling.

You might want to try to unearth Software Cinemaster 98/99. It's my favorite DVD playback software for old hardware. It's efficient. I imagine it would play VCD.

Can you try QuickView Pro from
http://www.multimediaware.com/qv/download.htm