Just wanted to share a quick success story... DVDs are actually playing
reasonably on my 366 MHz Celeron laptop!
My ThinkPad i1452 played DVDs pretty darn well when it was new. At 64
Mb, though, it was really starved for memory. So I upgraded to 192 Mb.
MemTest run all night, Linux kernel recompiles work, Win98 works, so I
know the memory is good. But twenty minutes into any DVD, it locks up
solid.
IBM had no fixes, so I tried upgrading to Win2K. DVD playback is now
really, really, REALLY bad. What can I do? Apparently I can either
have good DVD playback or a reasonable amount of memory. A few months
ago I tried Ogle, VideoLan and Xine, but they were waaay to slow.
So, last night, on a whim, I tried mplayer. After tweaking it a bit
mplayer -dvd 1 -ao sdl -vo xv -forcexv -dr -quiet -framedrop
It plays great!! Well, some movies play better than others. Top Gun
isn't so good, but My Cousin Vinnie is excellent. Even better than
Windows!
This old beast has some life in her yet. I think it's time to wipe
ReiserFS over the Windows partition. :)
- Scott
