Newbie question about DVD

Hi,

What do I need to play a DVD-movie in my PC ?

thanks in advance

On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 08:40:23 GMT, "El Jerid"
wrote:


"Newbie" wrote in message
...
Hi,

What do I need to play a DVD-movie in my PC ?

thanks in advance

Only a DVD-ROM player and a reader software (WinDVD, PwerDVD).
And of course, a "not to old" PC (Pentium 3 - 500 Mhz or better) and good
VGA card (GeForce 3 or better).


Geforce 3 or better is not needed.
There is ZERO benefit to a Geforce 3 or better, over most older cards
until you go back pretty far... Any card made in '98 would do fine.

The minimum video card requirement might be enough video memory to
support the resolution, and fast enough to display 30FPS in 2D, which
is hardly demanding compared to 3D. For example, somewhere I still
have an old ATI Rage II+ PCI 2MB EDO that plays DVD fine. For
smoother playback motion compensation also helps, so with very old PCI
cards ATI is better. In the late '90s partial MPEG decoding helped,
but today with faster systems, it's unnecessary since the rest of the
system could do that without any help.

Beyond the video card, a 500MHz CPU is about right... A K6-3/450 could
do it, as well as Celeron 533, PIII-500, etc, but at this minimal
level it is important to have MPEG decoding features on the video
card. Add about 150MHz worth of performance to above figures if the
video card doesn't support it.


Dave