The VideoLAN Forums

I'm using VLC to watch DVDs (archived on a large external HD) on an old "Zenega S100 Vision box" x86 set-top box (Intel Celeron 733 MHz, 128 MB RAM, Windows XP). VLC 1.1 played DVDs fine, including subtitles (after tweaking some settings). VLC 2.0 I can barely get to play DVDs without stuttering (still noticeable in complex scenes). When I enable DVD subtitles (or there is any text overlay, like the file name) it significantly stutters persistently. Is there anything I can do about that (besides downgrading) or did VLC 2.0 drop support for such low resource machines?

You can try various things:
- change video output to directdraw in preferences
- try to deactivate audio. If that works, remove the libsamplerate_plugin.dll and libspeex_resampler_plugin.dll from your VLC installation folder.

You can try various things:
- change video output to directdraw in preferences

Switching to DirectX did not help. However, additionally deactivating "Use triple buffering for overlay" in its settings helped, especially when subtitles are on. But it still was not really smooth.

- try to deactivate audio. If that works, remove the libsamplerate_plugin.dll and libspeex_resampler_plugin.dll from your VLC installation folder.

That did it. Video is playing perfectly smooth now, even with subtitles.
I could also re-enable the triple-buffering setting without negative effects (maybe slightly higher CPU usage, but the CPU load never shows close to 100%).

Thanks a lot. It's great to know that VLC is still the video player for all setups.

edit:
I think I found the setting to fix the stuttering without moving files:
Audio/SRC resampler/Sample rate converter type = Linear (fastest)
I'm not sure if it has the same effect behind the scenes, but the result is identical as far as I can tell