Postby lostcub » 22 Dec 2007 10:13
Well, the first thing is, and don't know why anyone has brought this up yet: why are you using XP on a 400 Mhz CPU? If you have or can get your hands on a Windows 2000 Professional Installer disk, this will help you out a lot if you were to use it instead. XP takes up a lot of resources in of itself, and nearly require 1Ghz for it to be stable.
I use a PII 667Mhz with Windows 2000 Professional, and can view most forms of video (with self taught tricks), however with only 400 Mhz it would be even tricker.
Always make sure that your overlay is working, on the applications you want it too. Windows previewer in a web view folder can "steal" your overlay from another, so it's best to sometimes turn it off. (however sometimes the embedded media player is much lower in system resources it can work better than some players depending on the codec; if setting are set right, double clicking on that small preview window, can go full screen.).
Don't re size the video, unless you are re encoding it, as this take processing too.
VLC Player is very good on resources, as long as you don't add things inline.
Turn off everything on VLC Player you don't need, including the equalizer and color adjustments (everything running inline will take up more CPU power)
Turn off deinterlacing.
Open Task manager and turn off all processes that are not needed to play the video, including real time virus protection (disconnect from the internet is advised).
Open services and turn off services that are not needed; such as, automatic updates. (if you don't know what is what here, don't mess)
Keeping Task Manager up, load VLC Player and the video file, but don't play it yet. (do NOT minimize it)
In Task Manager, turn off the process explorer.exe (the windows shell). Every thing will pretty much disappear on the desk top, except those things not minimized.
These things may help you, changing the process VLC.exe to high might help even more (do NOT put it in "realtime", more than likely you will loose total control over you computer).
Another thing that can also help is; if you can stream the video file from another computer on your home network . This will take more load off that machine, that can use for processing. An old Pentium S 133Mhz can stream (but not play) HDTV files. (don't throw Old PCs away, they make great network servers, especially media! Window 2000 works great on old machines when used as a server. Just make sure you set enough paging file, to make up for low RAM.)
Codecs will be the major problem, as most of the newer ones are really compressed and takes a lot of processing to decompress. An uncompressed AVI, providing your hard drive is fast enough, and the file is not too fragmented, you could probably play it without dropping a frame, at 240X320 and possibly 480x640 if the AVI is not interlaced.
I've found the only flawless way to play a DVD quailty MPEG-2 is by using WinDVD 2000 (not any of the later versions). I wish someone could abstract the way it uses the MPEG-2 codec that plays every frame of the VOB file, and only using 50% of my PII 667Mhz CPU! Even the AC3 stays in sync with the video, not even VLC on my system can do that. However, "WinDVD 2000"can only play MPEG 1 and 2 only.
I don't know if any of this will help, however 400Mhz may sound too slow to play videos, but...is it really? I don't think the first DVD stand-a-lone players even used that much CPU and some still may not be. Just goes to show you, what-all is being wasted in the players and stuff. Most of the stuff isn't even needed most of the time, and not only is it just waisting bandwidth, it also encoding loss...something to think about.
Lostcub
but it work!! 
Thanks again !!