The VideoLAN Forums

Hello,

I am using VLC 0.8.5 on a laptop with WinMe, 256 MB RAM and a Pentium III 447 MHz CPU.

I often experience gaps in video play, where VLC seems to experience buffer underruns.

Is there a way to increase cache or other measures to aid with this problem?

HD read ahead is set to 100%, CD-ROM cache is set to max. (1238 KB).

I experience this with DVDs as well as with files I have copied from DVD to HD.

This laptop has a 4 x Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-2202 and a IBM-DJSA-220 20 GB HD.

Any suggestions?

Kind regards,

Frank

Have you tried opening preferences, enabling "Advanced Options", then navigating to Input Codecs/Access Modules/Files and changing the cacheing value to something larger?

Finding a program to play DVDs with your CPU is going to be the real trick. This didn't come into its own until 500 or 550s. As for most other things like DivX or XviD with smaller resolutions than the DVD shouldn't be a problem. In more modern machines the video card does most of the work but in your era it was difficult to find a video card that did this.

Thanks, good advice.

It's a bit strange that they built a DVD drive in a laptop that isn't up to par.

At least I know what to expect.

Thanks guys.

Some older computer have decoder hardware for DVD video (MPEG-2) playback (which require certain software to work) but without it, its going to be hard to decode DVD.

To update my findings:

It made a huge difference when I stopped burning my DVDs with Pinnacle!

I also found out that Zoom Player is very slim.

Hope this helps somebody ...

Kind regards,

Frank