First post, by emosun
- Rank
- Oldbie
I'm having an issue when playing back Microsoft video 1 on the 486. The issue I'm having is is that , when a video file size exceeds the amount of ram the system has , the hard drive has to tick along every couple of seconds to load more information. When this happens it causes the video that's playing to lose a few frames giving the video a "smooth then stop smooth then stop" look.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3nZ7TduOI0
You can quite literally see the drive light illuminate when the video stutters. I can't tell if the issue is that the drive is slow , or that the cpu just isn't fast enough to be able to move the information on the drive and run the video at the same time.
hardware specs
486dx-40
8mb ram
diamond stealth 32 vlb
video
microsoft video 1 160x120 900kbps 15 or 24fps 18 minutes around 120mb size
windows media 6.4.07.112
So far i've tried
Reducing the video quality , however , this doesn't solve the problem because the files overall size is still larger than the ram and the system will have to access the drive at some point. Files that are only a few megabytes will play fine but they are only maybe 30 seconds long at most.
Tried mpeg video , even though there's no acceleration on this machine. The machine tends to crash when playing mpeg video. I don't think an accelerator would actually fix this problem as the machine will also sometimes crash when I push Microsoft video 1 too hard as well.
I tried installing a DOM to replace the hard drive , however , the machine reads it as only a 100mb drive. I tried to copy the windows 95 installation from the drive to the DOM. However the machine wouldn't boot from it or recognize it was boot able. I also tried installing another vlb drive controller with the DOM on it to see if I could run the video file off of it instead of the main drive. However windows only detected the serial ports on the drive controller and not the drive controller.
I also considered using my plus hardcard 105 to have the video file on , however i think the hardcard is actually slower than the drive it's using. Plus 105mb is less than the size of the video file that it would need to hold.
I might have to buy a 512mb DOM , But I still don't know if that'll fix it or if the cpu is just too slow.
Or adding more ram would allow more of the video to be loaded at once but would still need to access the drive anyway.
Question is do you think a DOM would fix this issue or is it cpu speed related?
