The idea here is to create a barebones "standalone" DivX player. My roomate I have a lot of 486 part laying around, including a card with S-video out, and with a couple eBay purchases, I should be able to create an entire system.

I know that I can run Linux on this machine, but will it be fast enough or powerful enough to run say, Xine, or similar programs? What distro would be best? Is it possible to run a media program without having a WM installed?

Sorry, I do not yet have the specifics for the CPU, video, etc... And if it matters, the movies were encoded with DivX 5.02.

I have seen this done on more powerful machines, but the idea is to spend as little money as possible.

Thanks.

Gveto

I've never seen it done but I'd say you won't get good quality out of a 486. I mean on my 1ghz machine, mplayer still complains that my system is too slow to play dvd's, movies ripped from acidrip
But they still play really well though on a machine that much faster, I'm just saying a 486 is pushing it a bit. The only think I could suggest is to maybe try, I guess it won't hurt in anyway.

worth a go, but between you and me, it will not be even nearly fast enough, no chance. that is some serious processing you will need to do there.

The "slowest" system i ran divx on with Windows was a P2 - 350 Mhz with 128Mb ram and a 16Mb Vanta AGP Card..
It did good actially.. thoug the gfx card dident have s-vhs..

You might want to check out the Mini-ITX Motherboard =)
www.mini-itx.com

Virtus.

I used to burn CDs on a 486...

I doubt it would work tho, 486's max out at what 120, the new procs out now are over 2000. Few, if any 486 boards have PCI and I doubt VLB would cut it for movie quality video. Even with PCI, the bus still runs at like 20, 25Mhz and PCI does 33 and 66Mhz on new computers and are still too slow not to mention the AGP bus goes way faster.

I play DVDs in Win98 on a 600 Athelon and it stutters at times, I think of that as bottom barrel but in linux you could get away with slower.

I'd say you should eBay a new board/cpu while you are at it or even upgrade one of your PCs and use it's old mobo/cpu for divx. At a minimum, anything with AGP would probably work.

It may be really hard. It's not easy to have good quality of MP3 file on 486...

using xine in redhat with my experience requires at least a ghz proccessor to play any divx movies i had to overclock my celeron 800 to just over a ghz just to run a divx movie in full screen. ive gotten divx movies to play on a 500mhz k6-2 running xp but it needed a gforce 2mx just to play smooth. i hope this helps. you're best bet is to try starting with windows 95 and go from there, for some reason the proccessor requirements running xine under linux seem to be very high.

on a 486 machine even x window will be crawling and i my opinion no way for xine or mplayer to run divx videos.when running xine on my celeron 1600 machine xine uses 50 percent of cpu usage.

Strange....When I run Xine on 600MHz Duron it takes approx 21% cpu.

To have an efficient machine you should compile everything by yourserlf, particularly the kernel and X.
But as the others said, you won't be able to do any video stuff with your 486.
Maybe a little server, gateway etc. would do.

++

When using MPlayer you don't need X to watch divx. But anyway, I don't believe it's possible to run high quality divx movies on a 486 machine.
I've tested my K-6 350 MHz with 192 MB SDRAM and have been able to watch almost any divx file in fullscreen without framedrops but this seems to be close to the lowest system requirements.

just curious have you played any divx movies that were done under the 5.1 codec those movies seem to require alot especially if they are really compressed. are you using xine?

Can you tell me the steps you have followed and the distro that you have used? I got Pentium Celeron 366Mhz, 320 RAM, 64 MB GeForce 2 and a lot of divx . The movies run perfect, but when I load the subtitles the audio is faster than the video. I use MPlayer 0.90rc5-3.2.2 (C) 2000-2003 Arpad Gereoffy (see DOCS)

CPU: Intel Celeron A Mendocino/Pentium II Dixon (Family: 6, Stepping: 5)
Detected cache-line size is 32 bytes
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 0 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 0 SSE2: 0
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX

I thing the CPU stuff is wrong, as i said I'm whit Celeron 366


Can ideas?


Thanks in advice!

if im correct there are is a distro specifically designed for such purpose, ill look the url up asap

Well, I've a Intel Pentium 166 MHZ with Slackware 9.0. Even mp3 playing is choopy (no X, mplayer and command line), but it did a nice job with win95/win98 on it. Even some movies as Quick Time were relatively fast on it.

In another hand, I have a Intel P2 - 400 MHZ with 384 of RAM, but a crappy graphics card (4 megas ATI inbuilt) also with Slackware 9.0. Both Xine and mplayer are very disappointing on this machine (which is not that bad). For some reason, Win98/95 performs video better then Linux on older machines (my personal experience). About DivX is another story. The file is pretty compressed and use large amounts of video/ram memory to play the movies. I really don't think it's possible