Very confused by DVD playback performance \ VOGONS

Very confused by DVD playback performance

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First post, by matt102498

Posted on 2025-10-11, 21:27

matt102498 Offline

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After a long hiatus, I think I'll be back here asking the gurus for information again for a while.

Back in 2001 I bought a Cyberpower PC with an ATI rage 128 pro all-in-wonder. This machine played DVDs like butter. Since then, I have been trying to build an "ultimate" socket 7 build, and it mostly works. My system now is as below:

Motherboard: EPoX MVP3G5
Ram: 768 mb
Processor: AMD K6-III+ 550 (not modded)
Primary graphics: AMD Radeon 7500
Secondary graphics: SLI Diamond Monster 3D2 12 mb
Audio: Diamond Monster Sound Aureal 8830
Also added a 4 port VIA USB 2.0 PCI card
Lastly a Hauppauge WinTV-GoPlus with an IR blaster to use an OTA antenna and a digital converter box (because my previous rage 128 pro AIW was analog only)

OS: CF to IDE swappable Win ME and Windows XP (both are very responsive and initiate glide on an SLI setup fine)

And the most common question to be answered is yes, I've installed the via Hyperion 4.35 chipset driver to both OS.

The problem is now with DVDs, they play like stop motion films. I did just purchase an ATI rage theater 128 pro 32 mb to see if it's just a hardware generation phenomenon. Appreciate any suggestions to get DVDs to play smoothly.

P.S. My socket 478 Intel 3.4 Ghz extreme edition with Radeon 4570 is still kicking. Sometimes fails to post, so I bought another Abit IC7-Max3 motherboard to see if that is the issue. Bad capacitor era.

Thanks for any input.
Matt

Main Rig: ABIT IC7-MAXIII P4 EE 3.4GHz 4GB OCZ Platinum HIS Radeon 4670HD AGP 120Gb OCZ SSD
Retro: EPoX MVP3G5 K6-III 450 768 CL2 ASUS Geforce 5950 Ultra Aureal Vortex
Looking for: IBM PS/1 supporting 64mb ram

Reply 1 of 8, by b_riera

Posted on 2025-10-11, 22:43

b_riera Offline

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I guess I would try ruling out the drive by ripping a DVD to the CF drive and playing the directly. If DMA isn't on for the DVD drive then that's going to kill the CPU trying to deal with that data stream while simultaneously decoding it.

I remember commercial software like PowerDVD had much better software decoders than anything freely available at the time.

I've seen a PII 300 with an Ati Rage 128 play DVD video decently and definitely not a slide show like you're describing (different CPU though I know and this was a very long time ago). I'm almost certain it had a very specific DVD player program though.

ATI and nVidia at the time usually had some sort of hardware assist. You'd still use software decoding but it would help lower CPU utilisation.

I guess try the first test before buying anything else!

Reply 2 of 8, by Unknown_K

Posted on 2025-10-11, 23:04

Unknown_K Offline

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Are the HD and DVD drive on separate IDE cables?

Collector of old computers, hardware, and software

Reply 3 of 8, by b_riera

Posted on 2025-10-11, 23:39

b_riera Offline

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I went and did my own test just now.

I have a Pentium II 333 with a GeForce 2 MX400 with no hardware MPEG 2 decoding but some assist if the DVD player supports it apparently. Also, it doesn't have a DVD drive so I copied a VOB file off a disc and transferred it over.

Running Media Player Classic on Windows 98 and it was a total slideshow.
So I installed Cyberlink PowerDVD XP 4.0 and it played back very smoothly. The CPU usage was at 100% though but it was still smooth.

So, software definitely matters on something this old. Also, what he said ^^^

Reply 4 of 8, by Repo Man11

Posted on 2025-10-12, 01:56

Repo Man11 Offline

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The lowest spec system I've recently played a DVD on is a PCChips M520 with a K6-3+ 450 (6x75 MHz), a PCI FX5500, Win98 SE and 96 megs of EDO. With PowerDVD XP installed it played DVDs with no issues.

After watching many YouTube videos about older computer hardware, YouTube began recommending videos about trains - are they trying to tell me something?

Reply 5 of 8, by matt102498

Posted on 2025-10-12, 15:21

matt102498 Offline

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b_riera wrote on 2025-10-11, 22:43:
I guess I would try ruling out the drive by ripping a DVD to the CF drive and playing the directly. If DMA isn't on for the DVD […]
Show full quote

I guess I would try ruling out the drive by ripping a DVD to the CF drive and playing the directly. If DMA isn't on for the DVD drive then that's going to kill the CPU trying to deal with that data stream while simultaneously decoding it.

I remember commercial software like PowerDVD had much better software decoders than anything freely available at the time.

I've seen a PII 300 with an Ati Rage 128 play DVD video decently and definitely not a slide show like you're describing (different CPU though I know and this was a very long time ago). I'm almost certain it had a very specific DVD player program though.

ATI and nVidia at the time usually had some sort of hardware assist. You'd still use software decoding but it would help lower CPU utilisation.

I guess try the first test before buying anything else!

I didn't think to check if DMA was working on the drive. Would be a simple solution. I'll have to figure out where the DMA enabled check was again.
Thanks

Reply 6 of 8, by matt102498

Posted on 2025-10-12, 15:22

matt102498 Offline

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Posts: 16
Joined: 2014-04-04, 01:27

Unknown_K wrote on 2025-10-11, 23:04:

Are the HD and DVD drive on separate IDE cables?

Yes, IDE 1 is the CF, IDE 2 is a DVD and CD drive

Reply 7 of 8, by matt102498

Posted on 2025-10-12, 15:24

matt102498 Offline

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Rank: Newbie
Posts: 16
Joined: 2014-04-04, 01:27

b_riera wrote on 2025-10-11, 23:39:
I went and did my own test just now. […]
Show full quote

I went and did my own test just now.

I have a Pentium II 333 with a GeForce 2 MX400 with no hardware MPEG 2 decoding but some assist if the DVD player supports it apparently. Also, it doesn't have a DVD drive so I copied a VOB file off a disc and transferred it over.

Running Media Player Classic on Windows 98 and it was a total slideshow.
So I installed Cyberlink PowerDVD XP 4.0 and it played back very smoothly. The CPU usage was at 100% though but it was still smooth.

So, software definitely matters on something this old. Also, what he said ^^^

I used PowerDVD 4.0 XP at the suggestion of the online community that it played so well with ATI graphics. It's probably about 5 frames per second, they play, but not well.

Reply 8 of 8, by Matth79

Posted on 2025-10-12, 16:13

Matth79 Offline

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Did you try ATI Multimedia Center, that probably has the best ATI GPU acceleration

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