Page 1 of Just how powerful a PC do you need to play DVDs on a PC

I`ve never used it for dvd playback, but when I decide to have a go it was not very successfully with either Win DVD (came with the pc) or Windows media player 10, all that happens is bits of sound and a frozen part picture that never gets fully shown, as it trys to load the next frame 3 or 5 seconds along.

My pc is getting on a bit I know, it has:

M/B is Lex BN790E with on board sound AC`97
An Athlon XP 2000+ 1.66 Ghz
512 MB of ram
80 Gb Hard drive
Graphics card is Mentor nVIDIA Geforce4 MX440SE/128MB with a S-Video tv out.

I would have thought playing a dvd would be within its means, but it seems not.

Cracking toast, Gromit!

This item was edited on Wednesday, 9th November 2005, 15:56

Hello,

My kids play DVDs on a PC with a much poorer spec than yours, 1.3Ghz AMD I think, on-board graphics and sound and through Windows Media Player.
I know it won`t help your problem knowing this but I suppose it suggests that it`s not a hardware problem.

Sorry i can`t help more.

Neil.

I used to watch dvds on a 533mhz no problems could be the disk you are playing.

are you running any other programs while playing the dvd?

definitely should be able to play DVDs. check that the dvd drive is set to DMA in the hardware device manager in system properties as i used to get some visible pauses (though not that bad) before i patched the bios to deal with running dma on both ide channels (which shouldn`t be a problem for you) on a 1GHz processor. Also try updating the video drivers

my PII450 plays DVDs ok, I make sure nothing else is running in background though.

You could try getting a PCI MPEG2 decoder card.

Al

www.admars.co.uk

Yepo, you should be ok on anything 350 and upwards -Power DVD states that as the minimum. I`ve got them up and running no problem of AMD 450 and upwards-I`ve even got DVD burners working on AMD 550`s at x4 speed too-the trick is, shut down anything non essential while you watch

Thanks all,

I will check nothing is running in the background, I got the pc to do video editing with Studio 8 and then 9, which it coped with fine. Just thinking AVG is probably running in the background, I`ve not set anything else to, so maybe one of windows little miscreants is running away with out my knowing. I`ll get the mags out again for the windows progs you can shut down on a single pc.

Cracking toast, Gromit!

i had the same problem on a s*** hot 2.4ghz 512mb 16" laptop. problem was caused by using a self created power profile (despite it being leaned twoards performance)

problem solved by using the standard ac power/ battery power profiles. even running on batteries its ok.

fyi we have a 1.1ghz pc at work plays dvds great.

THE MOST ANNOYINGLY LARGE PENIS EVER - REMOVED BY SURGEONS.