DVD on a Pentium MMX?

[EvilDonnyboy]

I got an offer for an ATi XPERT 98, which has TV-out. I got an old (but quiet) IBM with a Pentium 233MMX cpu, that could be placed near my Home Theatre.

I could buy the vid card and invest in a cheap slow DVD drive and play DVD's on it. But I have doubts that the Pentium 233MMX can handle it, even with the iDCT motion compesation from the ATi Rage Pro video card.

The IBM is pretty much as fast as a pentium MMX system goes. 512kb cache, 32mb of EDO (to be ungraded to 64mb, no SDRAM support), integrated Matrox Millenium (to be replaced with the ATi card).

Will it handle it? It only needs to do 640x480 for the S-Video out, so no hi-res decoding is needed.

[Wombat]

I know my friend's 166MMX couldn't do it. But his solution was to buy a Hollywood+ card (with remote, cool) and use that.

[az]

I think you'd still need a P2 with more than 300 MHz for it - you could buy a hardware decoder card like Wombat mentioned, but if you get the Decoder, VidCard, AND RAM, that would be quite expensive, I'd rather get a standalone DVD player for the money - I doubt that your system's output quality will be higher than that of a standalone player.

AZ

[EvilDonnyboy]

Well ATi's iDCT on the Rage 128 is close to the speed of Hardware decoder's.

[fds]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by EvilDonnyboy:
Well ATi's iDCT on the Rage 128 is close to the speed of Hardware decoder's.</font>

Not quite.

[EvilDonnyboy]

Ok screw it then. No point in getting the ATi.

[dsp]

Another point, the XPert98 isn't a Rage 128 chip.

dsp