I have started down the path of yet another expensive hobby…a “backyard” theater. I have decided to try to put one of my old computers to use instead of throwing it out. I am going to use it as a DVD/video player. It is a Pentium 3 550mhz cpu with 320mb PC100 RAM. The video card is a Geforce 2 MX400 AGP. I have Windows XP Home installed. First, I installed Media Player Classic in hopes that it could be a player for all formats. However, DVD playback was not very smooth. I checked CPU usage and it was around 60-something %. I thought this was high and since I’m not that familiar with MPClassic, I wasn’t sure if hardware acceleration was enabled. So I installed PowerDVD 7 and checked CPU usage and it was around 80-something %. I looked under “Video” and it did have a check mark beside Hardware Acceleration in PowerDVD. But I don’t understand why the CPU usage is so high and playback is somewhat jittery. I know it’s an old cpu but the video card should be doing most of the work…and I know the video card isn’t that great but I thought it would do video OK. So why am I getting such high cpu usage? Is it because of the old cpu or the video card doesn’t do mpeg2 decoding that well? I’ve used this video card before for video playback and it performed well, but it was being used with an Athlon XP processor at that time.
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