I believe it was somewhere in the r19xx range that they dropped support. Maybe try r1940?

I want to hear what you manage to play. I tried making a K6-III divx box years ago and it failed miserably. 😉

I'm not sure why exactly you want to play videos on such an old machine, but if that's all you want to do, you should look at Geexbox:
http://www.geexbox.org/

swaaye wrote:

I want to hear what you manage to play. I tried making a K6-III divx box years ago and it failed miserably. 😉

yeah you are right man, the performance is terrible. i'll try using a radeon card instead and see if it could improve a bit.

I don't know if it's ever going to play divx well but you should try a variety of decoders. Xvid, Divx, ffdshow. Older versions of some may be best.

DVD should be playable in software though as it's less demanding. Might still want to dig up an old PowerDVD because they were very optimized. A Radeon will offload most MPEG2 decoding if you use a decoder that supports DXVA.

Last available build which declare compatibility with i586 family cpus is rev1936
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow-tryou … id.exe/download
Old Thrashbarg is right, really last (on the assumption of changelog) ) is rev1940 but it is nowhere in the net.

Some time ago i trying to use rev1943 on K6-III+ with no luck. It installs ok but crashes players.
rev1936 works ok on it.

It would be interesting to try comparing FFDSHOW with and without its 3DNow and MMX support enabled. I've been wondering how much they tuned for K6 chips.

But if it can't play ~480p DIVX/XVID/etc then maybe there's no point in bothering. Software MPEG1/2 playback is uninteresting when so many video cards accelerate it, and there's no chance of H.264/VC-1 playback.

swaaye wrote:

Software MPEG1/2 playback is uninteresting when so many video cards accelerate it.

yeah but what player should i use to utilize hardware playback? i've been using ffdshow for a long time because cpu has rarely been such a problem.

My first choice would be PowerDVD or WinDVD. A version of either that will work on 98SE and uses DXVA. PowerDVD 3 or 4 maybe.

Otherwise, if you are on XP, you can find a codec pack that has the Cyberlink MPEG2 decoder. This does DXVA decoding.

There is also the possibility of finding the old ATI DVD Player. I'm not sure where to get it though and I've never used it.

Something I found with DVD playback software is that with new versions, the hardware requirements increase for some reason.

So on a slow maching, get one of the earlier versions and hopefully it plays all your discs.

Regarding ffdshow, on my netbook I use Media Player Classic Home Cinema because it uses even less CPU. Not sure how ffdshow is configured though, it was part of a codec pack (Sharky).

Yeah that's why I suggest one of the old PowerDVD or WinDVD versions that work on 98SE. They will be more tailored to old hardware. The ATI DVD Player is a rebranded Cinemaster player (I think) and old as well.

On XP, a codec pack with the Cyberlink MPEG2 decoder and Media Player Classic set for overlay output is about as low usage as you can get. MPC and ffdshow themselves do not have MPEG2 DXVA support so you need the Cyberlink decoder.

swaaye wrote:

MPC and ffdshow themselves do not have MPEG2 DXVA support

Didn't ffdshow just get that recently?

Jorpho wrote:

swaaye wrote:

MPC and ffdshow themselves do not have MPEG2 DXVA support

Didn't ffdshow just get that recently?

It appears to be only H.264 and VC1. I have yet to see a DXVA MPEG2 codec from an open source project. Media Player Classic Homecinema has internal DXVA support for both VC-1 and H.264 as well.

Quite the list of DXVA software over here. I didn't realize so many projects have been working on it. I typically just use FFDSHOW and MPCHC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX_Video_Acceleration

BTW, Windows Vista and 7 have a DXVA MPEG2 codec included. Win7 may also support VC-1 and H.264.

Win7 may also support VC-1 and H.264.

Yep, it does. As a matter of fact, you can set MPC-HC to use it by going to the 'external filters' menu and adding the MS 'DTV DVD Video Decoder', then disabling MPC-HC's internal H.264, VC-1, and MPEG2 DXVA codecs. I found that it works better than the MPC-HC MPEG2 decoder, especially for interlaced stuff, but it doesn't really gain you anything for the other two formats so you may as well leave MPC-HC to take care of those on its own.

swaaye wrote:

There is also the possibility of finding the old ATI DVD Player. I'm not sure where to get it though and I've never used it.

Ive got it 😉
version 127 from xpert@play gfx card
8mb if anyone wants it

Cyrix 6x86MX/MII have i686 instructions. Just my 2cts.
(Probably not useful in this case since they won't approach the performance of a K6-2+.)

I remember when I ran a 6x86MX with Linux I used -march=i686 to compile the kernel. I had to change that when I upgraded to a K6-2.