Go for MPEG-1 and an accelerator card. You'll need to convert the videos though.

Yeah got a mpeg decoder card and you'll be able to run vcd/352x288 mpeg videos without issue, I just bought one for my 386DX40 waiting for it to arrive in the mail, the one I bought is a sigma designs realmagic but most of them dont come with the vga passthrough cable so keep that in mind as in you wont find one.

Hmmm not sure if MPEG accelerator cards are really an option. At least i have doubts about passthrough since my screen is internally connected through the feature connector.

Here's a video of my baby, so you get an idea what I am talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T5jknGazmE

Have you tried QuickView or QuickView Pro:
http://multimediaware.com/qv/

Wow, thanks a lot for the link. Exactly what i wanted. The performance of this player is outstanding and to my surprise it even allows you to watch divx, wmv and other formats in DOS. So far i have had much fun with an MPEG-1 video in fullscreen. Gonna test a bit more, but looks like this is really the best solution ever. 😊 Big thanks to you!

Not only does it support a lot of audio and video formats, it also supports hardware acceleration for quite a number of graphic chips and a decent number of audio cards:
http://multimediaware.com/qv/qvdoc.htm
http://www.multimediaware.com/qv/chipsets.txt
http://www.multimediaware.com/qv/snddrv/

fronzel wrote:

The performance of this player is outstanding and to my surprise it even allows you to watch divx, wmv and other formats in DOS. So far i have had much fun with an MPEG-1 video in fullscreen. Gonna test a bit more, but looks like this is really the best solution ever. 😊 Big thanks to you!

It runs mpeg perfectly on your DX2-66? If so I wonder how low a 486 could be clocked and still run videos fine, what sort of video card are you running?

Hmmm the processor is not the bottleneck here, the memory is with Quickview. If you have around 32 MB or so you will be fine, but testing with bigger MPEG videos (Over 2 MB, 🤣) on my 486 it always said "not enough memory", even in pure DOS.

My card is a dirty old ISA VGA, something generic, no idea. Definitely not a great card.

If you just talk about "Videos" not about MPEG then maybe take a look how my HP-100LX performs (8086, 7 MHz, 640 KB RAM, monochrome...):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cFeUQcIjyA

(Or if you are more into GTA IV than short circuit this one is for you...):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrDWgJfcVr0

Imma test out a bit with other players. i remember there were other DOS MPEG players, just need to find them 🤣

Another software worth trying is Smacker:
http://www.radgametools.com/smkmain.htm
http://www.radgametools.com/binkhcws.htm

I tested a short video clip I converted using the RADTools, it plays fine in DOS on my 486SX33 as long as the video is 320*200 in size as there is no VESA support on my laptop, no sound either but it lacks a compatible soundcard, details about the DOS player below.

Download links:
http://www.radgametools.com/down/Bink/RADTools.exe
http://www.radgametools.com/down/Smacker/SmkTools.exe

It comes with players for DOS, Win3.x and Win95/NT4.
It supports any soundcard and DirectSound in Win95.

smackply.exe is the dos player, version 4.2d is in SmkTools, 4.2c in RADTools.exe

DOS Details […]
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DOS Details

Under DOS, Smacker can playback at 320x200 on any VGA card. To playback at higher resolutions, a VESA driver is required. VESA drivers are specific to your video card - they usually come on the diskettes that accompany your video card.

In the event that you don't have a VESA driver, Smacker also has 27 built-in video card drivers. The following video chipsets are supported directly: Ahead A, Ahead B, ATI Mach 8, ATI Mach 8+, ATI Mach 32, ATI Mach 64, Avance, Chips and Technologies 451, Chips and Technologies 452, Chips and Technologies 453, Cirrus Logic 54xx, Cirrus Logic 64xx, Genoa, NCR, Oak 67, Oak 77, Oak 87, Paradise PVGA, Paradise WD00, Paradise WD11, RealTek, S3, Trident 8800, Trident 8900, Tseng 3000, Tseng 4000, and Video 7.

If you can't find your VESA drivers and your card doesn't work with one of the built-in drivers, then you'll have to contact your video card manufacturer to get a VESA driver. You can also try using Scitech's Universal VESA driver which is described in the "Other Cool Stuff" topic. UniVBE is a shareware product, so if it works for you, then you'll need to license it from Scitech.

UniVBE is also useful as a VESA accelerator. UniVBE is VBE 2.0 compatible, which is a faster specification than standard VESA. Try it out - you may get faster playback just by using this driver!

For sound under DOS, we ship a subset of our own Miles Sound System that supports the SoundBlaster, SoundBlaster Pro, and SoundBlaster 16. The Miles Sound System can also automatically scale and mix multiple sound tracks on-the-fly. You can even play sound tracks that are a different format than the sound card supports (16-bit sound on an 8-bit sound card).

Some Smacker tests made on the DOS compatibility card of my Powermac6100, it has a 486DX2-66 and 8MB of RAM:

The VESA tsr, allowing for 640*480:

starcitizen320 300kbps.mp4 (50.85 MB)
http://www.multiupload.nl/EXGX27CVF7

starcitizen640 300kbps.mp4 (42.6 MB)
http://www.multiupload.nl/ZNHXH4RVC8

tex320 125kbps - 11kHz-8bitmono.mp4 (67.57 MB)
http://www.multiupload.nl/3DKFC0W2LD

tex320 300kbps - 44khz-16bitstereo.mp4 (25.2 MB)
http://www.multiupload.nl/NL1KV69AU3

At the end of each video you can see the stats of the player: memory used, skipped frames, % of cpu used by he video/audio decompression and so on.

Hmmm, smacker definitely IS interesting. 320x200 sounds quite lame but it looks pretty nice in fullscreen unless you have a DVD setup next to it. The memory consumption seems to be reasonable. On an 8 MB system i had better results with longer videos so far than with quickview. SOme other tools i have been toying with that seem to be good for "low end" systems (at least low RAM that is) is the DOS MPEG players, so far i found CMPEG, VMPEG and DMPEG (Yeah they all have great names, thats for sure!). At least with a non-vesa DOS system on 8 MB these perform amazingly well even with larger videos. Maybe imma upgrade my HDD to a solid state system to make sure IO is not the bottleneck here.

As you can see in my videos, it struggles with video in resolution higher than 320*200 if you have a non-VESA chipset and/or with high quality sound...
Could you link to the MPEG players you found?

OK, if i got the time imma test a bit more at the weekend and imma make a grab-bag with video players for download so you can try to test yourself. So far I stick to CMPEG atm, but gonna need to test a bit more.

OK, i finally came to upload my whole collection of DOS MPEG players. SO enjoy!

http://www.tankraider.com/userup/1366370256.zip

My other favorite DOS video viewer is DISPLAY, a Taiwanese program with a terrible name.
http://www.bttr-software.de/freesoft/graphics.htm

Oh, how silly of me: I should mention Geexbox and Movix, which are live Linux distributions that run from CD. The system requirements are pretty low, but you might have to dig up an older version of Geexbox.

dirkmirk wrote:

Yeah got a mpeg decoder card and you'll be able to run vcd/352x288 mpeg videos without issue, I just bought one for my 386DX40 waiting for it to arrive in the mail, the one I bought is a sigma designs realmagic but most of them dont come with the vga passthrough cable so keep that in mind as in you wont find one.

They have those in ISA? I thought they were only available in PCI.

You're probably confusing those with MPEG2 DVD decoder cards. Those require considerably more bandwidth than ISA is capable of. Though, I do have an MPEG2 decoder for EISA bus...but no drivers or software!

That taiwanese app "Display" is of course also in the package i posted earlier on. Actually I am amazed how much good shareware and freeware players and tools i was able to dig out. There's also that weird DOS tool for ripping a DVD, it will convert the first 10 or so minutes into MPEG which will take like an hour even on a fast system. However, I was amazed to find such interesting tools. The DVD4DOS is of course included in case you got a DVD drive in your DOS machine...

I tried to come across a gfx card with an MPEG decoder chip or daughterboard, but no luck, so imma stick to software solutions for now.