Maybe install ffdshow. Enable its sample rate conversion and set it to 44.1. Might add too much overhead though.
http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/wiki/faq:win9x

This is something I did with an AudioPCI once on XP. It's a 44.1 kHz chip too. It will play 48kHz but it's out of pitch.

swaaye wrote:

Maybe install ffdshow. Enable its sample rate conversion and set it to 44.1. Might add too much overhead though.
http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/wiki/faq:win9x

This is something I did with an AudioPCI once on XP. It's a 44.1 kHz chip too. It will play 48kHz but it's out of pitch.

Thanks. I tried that, but that only works for software using default directshow filters, and it still doesn't sound very good.
Even with the sample rate conversion quality set to high in windows, ffdshow set to resample anything above 44.1 down to 44.1, still DVDs play poorly.

Now that I think about it, your problem might be the K6-III and the platform itself.

I've experimented with K6-III+ DVD playback before and it wasn't pretty. Voodoo3 was probably the best video card choice because it's stable and the driver configured the CPU and AGP for maximum performance. I have an ALi Aladdin V board (P5A). There's an ALI AGP tweaker app that shows the various configuration options. Rage 128 worked pretty well too, with its full MPEG2 offload, but it's often not entirely stable on Super 7. Pentium III Katmai 450 blows Super 7 away when it comes to DVD playback thanks to better AGP, memory perf and because SSE is quite useful for MPEG2 decoding.

So in other words, your system is probably nearly at its limit just doing anything DVD related and the ISA sound card's quirks are putting it over.

swaaye wrote:

Pentium III Katmai 450 blows Super 7 away when it comes to DVD playback thanks to better AGP, memory perf and because SSE is quite useful for MPEG2 decoding.

3DNow is/was just as useful for MPEG2 decoding as SSE. Available MPEG2 decoders at that time from Elecard/Mainconcept/XMPEG also supported 3DNow. What's more using 3DNow optimized code on K6-2/3 resulted in much more performance gain compared to x87 floating point code than using SSE on PIII 'thanks to' K6-2/3's non-pipelined relatively slow FPU.

Falcosoft wrote:

3DNow is/was just as useful for MPEG2 decoding as SSE. Available MPEG2 decoders at that time from Elecard/Mainconcept/XMPEG also supported 3DNow. What's more using 3DNow optimized code on K6-2/3 resulted in much more performance gain compared to x87 floating point code than using SSE on PIII 'thanks to' K6-2/3's non-pipelined relatively slow FPU.

Yeah I suspect it's entirely the chipset that's the problem.

The striking thing about the P3 450 was it was still able to play a DVD well even underclocked to 66x4.5 (300 MHz).

I found my notes for the ALi Aladdin V AGP utility. The motherboard doesn't configure itself optimally and only 3dfx seemed to do it with their drivers. However, the system also crashed with some video cards when configured this way. Then again, ALI AGP isn't great with most AGP cards period.

1suggested settings for AGP utility
2dramatic improvement for some situations, ie DVD playback.
3
4Write allocation enabled without holes
5K6 features mask to 3
6GAT to 1 (not 2)
7AGP2X and sidebanding enabled
8Write combining enabled