I decided to do a reinstall of WinXP following a major hardware failure.

I currently have the following choices available for a software DVD Player

Intervideo DVD/MP3 XPack
Cyberlink DVD/MP3 XPack
Intervideo WinDVD 5

Would appreciate your thoughts/suggestions.

System: Intel P4 1.8ghz
512mb RAM
ATi Radeon 8500

On both my systems running NVidia graphic cards, NVDVD 2.55 gives me the best quality & lowest CPU utilization hands down.

On non-NVidia cards, Power DVD 5.0 seems the best.

Originally posted by ofelas:

"On both my systems running NVidia graphic cards, NVDVD 2.55 gives me the best quality & lowest CPU utilization hands down.

On non-NVidia cards, Power DVD 5.0 seems the best."

I don't think CPU utilization is as critical as it used to be with slower CPU's however it is nice to see this so you know that the coder(s) have tweaked the app and it's not as resource hungry

I personally use Power DVD 4 running thru Windows Media Player 9.xx

Originally posted by jmmijo:

"I personally use Power DVD 4 running thru Windows Media Player 9.xx"

I agree on PowerDVD of all types, good job it is... Media Player's cool too, it can do ALL kinds of things from one box!

Originally posted by jmmijo:

"I don't think CPU utilization is as critical as it used to be with slower CPU's however it is nice to see this so you know that the coder(s) have tweaked the app and it's not as resource hungry "

Code loop time wise, it is a GOOD thing... but, has some possible "Trade-Offs", some FYI on this, not meaning to be a prick, but trying to turn you onto why some apps have higher memory requirements for instance!

CPU use viewed thru a tool like taskmgr.exe is a good one for the CPU use part, but if a program loops alot (games, & multimedia ARE good examples of this)?

Sometimes it's WISE to increase the memory requirements, but not where you think they might be increased at (like user part, the graphics & string tables resources etc. OR even arrays/stringlists/collections/records/memory mapped data files it loads & uses).

Instead, like myself, alot of guys that write heavy looping programs opt to boost the stacksize of the program... just so the program has LOTS of room to run in, especially when looping!

(It can be deceiving to the end user analysing it too, make you think the program's a big pig in RAM, when in actuality, the programmers are protecting the stability of the program via the stacksize increase I mention above!)



* My programs that loop alot went up alot in RAM use because I did this VERY THING to protect their stability in fact, which was increase their base image & overall potential maximum stacksize!

APK