Old System - DVD drive possible?

[theif]

Hi,

I am currently using a Pentium 233 MMX + 128RAM. Is it possible for me to buy a DVD drive and be able to play full-screen DVD movies without any lagging/skipping? Do I need to buy any extra hardware besides the drive? Any suggestions? Thanks.

 

[grifterspawn]

Hmm...I would think that with such a low speed cpu that you would need a decoder card or video card that decodes on board.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I think grifterspawn is right, I couldn't find any software based DVD players that your CPU meets the minimum requirements of The lowest requirement I found was WinDVD using HWMC & iDCT and that was still a 300 Celeron or better. Maybe an older player would have lower requirements? However, you haven't listed your vid card so as he mentioned, if it has hardware decoding built in your good to go. So what card is it anyways?

 

[Rand]

Unless you have a 400MHz system or faster you will experience some skipping when playing back DVD's, if you have a graphics card with hardware DVD playback support you couldget by with only a 300MHz processor.

As is with only a PMMX 233MHz it will be difficult, if you happen to have an ATi Rage 128 or newer ATi graphics card you might be able to get by reasonably well though it won't be perfect. ATi has the most advanced DVD capabilities of any current graphics cards.
If you have another graphics card with hardware DVD acceleration you can try your luck... but odd's are the results won't be pleasant.

Without any form of an add-on hardware DVD decoder, or a graphics card with hardware DVD acceleration your system definitely would not be fast enough to play back DVD's capably.


Your best choice if your system can't handle it would ideally be to upgrade the processor, if that is not an option you may want to look into purchasing an add-on DVD Decoder card to off-load much of the decoding process to limit the load on your processor.
In such a case I'd personally recommend RealMagic Hollywood Plus DVD decoder, with such a card you may well be able to playback DVD's smoothly on your existing system.