Display of videos

[Felix]

Hi gang,

quite a while when I was here last time...

In the meantime I was forced to change my job due to the bad economics... Now I'm no longer sysadmin in a small company, but developer of railway interlocking systems - and with railway, an old dream of me became true... :)

However, here we go: I've finally sat up my old comp from scratch, using Win98Se, and added a little more RAM. Everything went fine so far, and the system is as follows:

Cyrix PR266
544 MB RAM
3GB HDD
ATI Video Charger Mach 64 VT2 PCI (2 MB RAM)

This system runs very fine for office apps and internet, as well as some image processing, which is 99% of my tasks.

However I've wanted to display some wmv videos I've got from a friend. (They display well in the office with a 2GB PC with Win2K, so there's not a general problem with them)

I've installed Win Media Player 7 and DirectX 9 and the video driver recommended by ATI (the Win98 built-in one). However the video pauses after 2 seconds, stays there for about 15 seconds, then jumps foreward, goes on for another 2 seconds, and so on... It feels like some sort of bottleneck. I've played around with hardware acceleration settings, but no result. and regarding the RAM, with more than half a gig there should be no problem at all...

The video is about 340x280 pixels and WMP notes "700kBit/s", which is, by the way, as few as an audio CD.

Does anyone have any idea?

Felix

[morriswindgate]

Make the viewable area smaller, the system doesn't have enough power to display it as you are viewing it.

[sdkfz]

second that, 2 mb for video these days is very low, you will need to make the video window significantly smaller than the screen to get any decent frames per second (ie no pause and jumping)

[Felix]

negative, I've now minimized the vievable area but no go; same result as before. BTW same system, but with Win95osr2 and only 64 MB RAM was able to display (other) videos -> ??

Can I manually select / ovverride the Framerate with a lower value somewhere?

Felix

[Dan]

I've got to agree with the motion...
your RAM isn't an issue here, it's the video card...it just can't keep up. try another one with, like 32mb, and you'll see a big difference.

[GaryRouth]

Did you adjust the vcache settings to help Win98 get along with the >512mb limit?

Here's a quote from an earlier thread:
__________
"If you have more than 512 mb of RAM it is necessary to put a limit on how much of that RAM Windows can use for disk cache. This does not limit in any way the ability of Windows to use the full amount of the installed RAM for program code and/or application data files.

"The disk cache must never be allowed to exceed 512 mb. To control it you put a limiting value (MaxFileCache) in the [vcache] section of c:\windows\system.ini. The general rule is that the value used should be approximately equal to 70% of the total installed RAM with an absolute maximum value (e.g. on computers with more than 730 mb of RAM) of 512000 kilobytes."
__________
I'm also surprised you've gone to DirectX 9 with such an old card. Still, with a small resolution and limited colors, that card should display videos with an acceptable frame rate. You could try an earlier version of Media Player (6.4 is more plain-vanilla) just to have something to try. It's not easy to go back to older DirectX versions, but I probably stick with 7.1 or if absolutely necessary 8.1b - let them iron the bugs out of 9 for a while.

I have a p233mmx with 194mb memory, DirectX 8.1, old Ati Xpert98 (8mb) - and I don't have any problems displaying video files with WMP or RealPlayer or QuickTime - whatever. It might be just that type of video file - wmv, that's giving you fits. I'll guess that .avi and .mov files play just fine.

Best of luck
. . . Gary