I would like your opinions on how I should expect DVD's to run on my computer setup. I have watched DVD's on my cousins computer (p3-650, voodoo3, 256meg RAM) and they jerk every second or so. This is not good enough for my viewing pleasure. I heard that a decent or relatively new video card (such as mine) can significantly help performance. I will be buying a 16x DVD drive as it's prob not worth getting one under this speed. Am I in for a smooth or close to it ride? Any tips, experiences ect most welcomed and appreciated.

My specs inlcude:

Athlon 600
Asus K7M motherboard
64 Meg GForce2mx 400
256 megs RAM
60 gig IBM 7200rpm hard drive
Soundblaster Live 5.1 DE
Windows XP pro

I will be using windows media player 8 to play the DVD's as I will likely get my dvd drive as OEM. However what is the least resource hungry software dvd player which could help with performance?

I'll be stoked if this setup is good enough as I won't be upgrading for ages. MAD MAX here I come!

Technology comes in 3 sizes - small, medium and RETRO!

Sounds like it'll work - if it doent it'll be the Athlon 600 thats the problem.

<font color=purple> "After great thought, things are always bought from the lowest bider"</font color=purple>

Currently, I'm using the following as my multimedia machine:

PIII 750
BX440 Board (Gateway motherboard)
384 MB PC100 RAM (Although I saw no difference when I had 128 Megs in there)
32 MB Matrox G450 Video Card (Connected to a 17 monitor and to a 27" Zenith TV)
20 Gig 5400 WD(?) and 60 gig 5400 WD Hard drives
Hercules Game Theater XP
Pioneer 16x slot DVD drive
Windows 2000
Cyberlink's PowerDVD XP

I have it play in a window on the Monitor and fullscreen on the TV (DVDMax mode of the matrox card) and my friends can't tell the difference from a dedicated MPEG card. Sound is not processed internally, but instead "piped" optically to a 5.1 DD and DTS Decoder/receiver. DVDs rarely jerk (maybe once every 3rd DVD? Just seems to be a random process that occupies the cpu for a bit).

What you may be more interested in is that playing a DVD takes 30%-50% of my processor according to Task manager. This is using PowerDVD XP (4.0?). Your setup should be able to handle a DVD, assuming that sound processing does not use much CPU power and Windows XP is not that much more of a resource hog than Win 2k. And I believe your Video card does have some video acceleration to help with DVD decoding (I don't think the matrox has any). If anything, I believe that you should be able to get demos of a few DVD players to try them out.

Good luck on your setup.
Zitch

Did you enable the DMA for the DVD-ROM?