Re: DVD player

[Thomas Halahan <tom@halahan.com>]

I don't understand why I can't get my K6-2 400MHz, and Rage 
IIC greaphics card to give good playback.  In the DVD howto 
I see that you need io ctrl in the Kernel.  Could it be 
that I do't have this feature enabled?  Is it really that 
critical.  

I guess I want to know what is the likely weakest link in 
my setup as I really know nothing about hardware.

Tom

> Video RAM is nearly irrelevant.  Anything with 2MB can do
> 1024x768/16-bit which is what you want for DVD.  For
> film-source DVDs you want 72Hz or 96Hz refresh so you
> need a RAMDAC of 82MHz or 110MHz respectively.  The other
> consideration for video cards is that it really must have
> an implementation of Xvideo for XFree86, hardware color
> space conversion, hardware scaling, and it must have
> enough video memory bandwidth to convert/scale at
> 1024x768/16.
>
> Briefly: you need at least a Matrox Millenium (c. 1995).
>
> Regarding the rest of the system, any 350MHz+ CPU with a
> vector math unit will work.  Pentium II/III/IV, Celeron,
> Duron, K6, Athlon, G4 should be fine.  Once you get to
> zero dropped frames, there isn't a lot of point in piling
> more hardware on.
>
> -jwb