DivX Playback Box...

[bar of soap]

I have been sick for the past few days, so I decided to do something about the fact that I haven't ever been able to watch my DivX flicks on my TV in the other room. I gathered up all the parts I needed (somehow they were all around my house) and built the system.

Specs:
AMD K6 233
96 MB PC-66 DIMM Ram
4 MB PCI Video Card w/ TV OUT
1.2 Gig JTS HD
ESS 1868 ISA 16-bit sound card
3com 3C509 ISA 10mbit NIC
WinFast ATA/66 PCI IDE Controller (onboard IDE wasn't functioning)
CD and Floppy, of course.

Anyway, I realize this is quite the low-end box; however, I thought that playing DivX on it with one of those players meant for slow machines would work. Sadly, the highest FPS I can reach is 17 windowed, 14 full screen. One of the advertising points of this card is that it is capable of smooth MPG playback at full screen. I have it networked with this box (T-Bird 1333, 512 ram, 40 gig, ETC). First, I tried opening a DVDivX off of this box directly on the other one. Same problem. I then tried to frameserve a DVDivX with this box using TMPGEnc and VFAPI, and then open it on the other box via a shared folder, but the framerate issue is the same. Is there any way I can transfer the load off of that box and put it here, so I can enjoy my movies in the other room? I looked and experimented for several hours trying to find a way to frameserve an AVI to MPEG1, but I cannot find anything. Hopefully, someone on here will have some better ideas.

soap

P.S.-
If nobody can figure this out.... anyone got a spare 500Mhz cpu/mobo sitting around??

[HillJack]

3com 3C509 ISA 10mbit NIC

I would replace the 10MBit NIC's with 10/100MBit NIC's so you run 100Mbit between both boxes.

10Mbit's is 1.25Mbytes per second under ideal conditions. ie: PCI NIC's w/bus-mastering and a decent computer, which a 233Mhz K6 is not

Your problems are most likely being caused by the files being read over the LAN far too slowly to be displayed properly. Maybe try copying a DivX to the 233 and play it locally. If it plays ok, then its the slow LAN. If it still only gets 17fps, then its probably the CPU or video card.

[MITSUI_1]

Divx just can't handle that sort of processor. Its too CPU intensive on the decode. Also, you'll never get decent frame rate uncompressed video over a network by frameserving.

Go with at least a 400MHZ k6. Use an ati RAGE vid card (AGP) for display.

My old roomates' DIVX box (at his TV-SET) is an old 450 mhz laptop (with TV out) turned sideways! You put the CD in, and it boots up and plays it. (He uses some DOS divx player that loads automagically in autoexec.bat).

Seems to work pretty well.