Second THG Video

Do the requirements listed below seem right to everyone? I have a Dell Inspiron 8000 with a Pentium III 700 MHz 512 MB RAM and a 32MB Geforce2 Go graphics card. Additional specs are available at:
http://docs.us.dell.com/docs/syste [...] tm#1000450

One of the greatest features of this system is a media bay into which you can swap out HDD's. I have one with RedHat Linux and another with Win98SE along with Windows XP Pro on the primary drive. If I want something besides XP I just pop in the drive and [re]boot.

Long story short I played this movie back on Win98SE, and although the CPU usage was higher than with redhat/xp (both peaked at 62-63% CPU utilization; 98 would start at 60+ and peak at 100% for several seconds and fall back down to 60-70%) it played flawlessly full screen with the screen at 1024x768 and 32-bit color...

With both XP and 98SE I used Media Player 7.1 and the DivX 4.12 codec. With RedHat the Divx 4.02 codec and MPlayer 0.60pre2.

So then my question why didn't it work on their 750? It seems it should ever so slightly outperform mine...

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Since the video is heavily compressed using the MPEG-4 standard, you'll need a powerful CPU to play it back smoothly. In our experience, full-screen playback should be possible with processors running at or faster than 900 MHz.

We performed tests on a Win 98 platform furnished with a Pentium III/750 and were unable to play the video without any problems. Checking the task manager showed that CPU capacity use was a constant 100 percent.

In other words, the small file size and the low data rate shown by the THG video have to be compensated for with a high-performance CPU. This time, the programmers put a lot of work into the MPEG-4 encoding process. In our experience, just as much effort has to go into the decoding and playback algorithms.
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Jason

There are aliens in my keys!!!