How much memory do you need to play a dvd?

[ChaunceyK]

I'm thinking of buying an older cheap laptop & putting a dvd-drive in it, so I can have both a portable dvd player & a portable pc in one. I don't plan on doing anything that would require alot of power, mostly homework & maybe some other really low-end stuff, so playing a dvd sould be the most memory-consuming thing I'd be doing with it.

At the risk of sounding like an idiot (wouldn't be my first time), does anyone know how much memory you need to play a dvd smoothly?

[edDV]

The older the PC and OS the more difficulty you will have. Best to use a video card with some DVD MPeg2 decode support.

I have an older barebones machine here but it is running XP home, 2.4 GHz Celeron and 512MB RAM, NVidea MX440 display card.

DVD playback through Power DVD 6 shows 38.6 MB RAM used by power DVD. Total RAM being used ~256MB.

[whitejremiah]

well, er....its not really MEMORY (i.e. ram or harddrive space......though having some ram will help the process :P i'd say anything over like 400-500mhz processor with like 256mb of ram should suffice...even with a built in video card....as for a laptop, if you said your gonna PUT IN a dvd drive, your honestly better off just getting it preinstalled.....finding a dvd rom to install into a laptop isnt very easy to do...nor is it very cheap....if you can find one with a dvd rom built in, your best off just doing that, because you can be guarunteed that it will play back a movie properly too.

[edDV]

I missed the laptop part. Look for at least a PIII 500 with the DVD ROM drive and {{driver}} included especially if running win98se.

If you are thinking about a USB connection that will require more CPU power and driver fiddling. Remember USB 1 was on the edge for even 1x DVD. Better to add a USB2 PC card or just bite the bullet and go for a Pentium 4 with Win 98se or XP for an external drive. If Win98se, you will need special drivers for both the PC card and the external DVD-ROM.