hi guys, i want to play dvds and real media on an AND K6-200.
So i was planning to use puppy linux or dsl, installed to hd, but i guess the X server is still too hungry in resources, so i decided to try without it.

I know mplayer and xine can work without X, just from the prompt... For you, will i be able to play movies from that machine (92 MB ram) that way?

And what software do you appreciate most? bye

Only one way to find out, I guess. Instal mplayer. Run it from command line with the option -fb like this:

mplayer video.avi -fb /dev/fb0

You might have to do this as root, or chmod 777 /dev/fb0 to work for any user.

What this does is redirects the output of mplayer to the primary framebuffer device (your graphics card).

Works nicely for me. I usually watch movies in KDE, but I tried this a couple of times. And it worked nicely.

Good luck!

thank you, any suggestion for the hardware?

It's like this. RAM is what you need. For a command line way, I have done it with 32 MB of consumption. But I would recommend at least 64 MB. And cut down on the services running (they're the ones eating up the ram).

As for video playback on a 200MHz box, I honestly don't know. I know only that in Windows, I needed at least 350 MHz for video DiVx playing. However it might work in command line with more free RAM.

I believe you could make it work. But there is really only one way to find out. Install slackware or some other distro, install only command line, without X. I run Knoppix on a 166MHz box with 98 MB of RAM in X mode and it works, but I never even thought of trying to watch movies on it

In Windows 98 on the same box the videos do not run smoothly.

Give it a try and tell us what happened. It could work.

I don't know about that.

I have an AMD K6 at 266 MHz with 64 MB of RAM, and even at the console, mplayer can't play anything bigger than about 320x240 DivX. And even then, that is with frameskipping enabled.

So if you are trying to watch full screen movies at full speed, I don't think it is going to happen.

yes i know the deal bout the divx, but if i well remember mpeg2 isn't so hard to decode as divx is. My idea was to play mainly realmedia and dvds... Of course the pci videocard installed, a 4 MB Ati, cannot decode mpeg2 on its own, so the Cpu have to do it all.

Do you believe tha my hw is still able for it?

As I said. Give it a try. You have nothing but time to lose. Post your results here. Iam interested too

ok, i'll try and let you know, hopefully soon
bye