Xing Mpeg Player For Windows 7

[Nathen Paisley]

Therewas metropolis in black and white on a magazine cover CD once. That's about all the movie it could handle. Multimedia clips in Encarta etc, were generally postage stamp sized. Unless you have some MPEG hardware then video CDs might work.

Edit: Best guess on the CD with Metropolis on was last half of '96 or first half of '97 on a Personal Computer World coverdisk. I think the timeframe is pretty solid, but it could have been a different magazine.

The former would work best with an mpeg1 decoding card and the latter benefits from having a good graphic card, both kind of discs can be found on ebay.

The list of titles released on MovieCD was over a hundred, with only a few good movies.

Nah, 5x86 won't quite do it, software MPEG 1 decoding is cycle thirsty, software only needs P133, any hardware codec help helps though, even SiS6326 PCI cards will enable it, if you get the right drivers.

I don't remember it, tried a heck of a lot of different ones back in the day on DOS, win 3.x and in slackware, nothing would do full frame rate on the 5x86 and I had it at 2x60, with all the goodies turned on I could turn on with set686. Only thing to do was decompress it to WMV, then it would play, and hog all my precious HDD until I was done.

On my 486 DX2-66 with 12mb RAM, I can play 320x240 15fps Cinepak AVIs I encode myself with FFmpeg just fine in full-screen VGA Mode X under Windows 3.1. I think the CPU can technically handle playing higher res/FPS videos than that, but it saves a lot on hard drive space.

There's a version of It's A Wonderful Life on CD-ROM that's meant to be playable on low spec machines, as low as a 486sx with 8MB of RAM. I've played it on a 386DX-40. You can find it as "It's A Wonderful Life The CD! 1993" on archive.org

I think it was what you might call "second gen" PCI graphics cards, like some versions of S3 Virge and Trio, and TGUI 9680, CL5440 had MPEG-1 acceleration and often had a player included. Hard to define what I'm thinking of as second gen, but first gen would share chipsets with ISA/VLB, and second gen would be PCI only. Though I've got an idea there was a last gasp high end VLB board that would do it, but deets are eluding my thinker. Some of them were quite cheap b y '97 and you could easily have had one without realising it had MP1... as opposed to knowing you had a specialist card like a ReelMagic or similar.

Those tended to be what various playback software tools advantage of for "hardware accelerated" video playback. It's the difference between models like the original Trio64 Vs the later Trio64V and V+. The Virge, for example, had all of the video acceleration functions of the Trio64V+.

Of course you then had later cards that offloaded the entire MPEG1 decoding to a dedicated chip or daughter board on the video card, but cards with the above features were more better termed "video acceleration", since those features could equally be taken advantage of for more general playback of other video formats and were not just limited to acceleration of MPEG video.

What I'm wondering is this... if there's anyone who's an old school video editor or format expert , what are some other ways/filetypes/methods to get decent quality video playback. As of right now I've just been playing with mpeg 1 and windows media player 7 (becuase for some reason I can't actually find a MPC that installs correctly). were there other formats that were used that were less cpu intensive?

dunno what -r 24 and -s 480x360 cinepak would do for classic pentium specs though. also note that ffmpeg's cinepak encoder is slowwwwwwwww. sounds like a possible phil chart project to find the most efficient codec/fps/size for each old cpu. MP3 is definitely off the table for sound. Similarly, MPEG4 codecs are all P2 territory at the minimum (including the ye old DivX ;-) 3.11)

Do you think it would yield better quality ultimately? My goal is too see how far the cpu can be pushed in terms of video playback quality. Without resorting to simply using a tv tuner card or something and just cheating.

You just gave me an idea to use one of my tv tuners to put Episode VII on a VHS tape. Consider me watching this thread cloooosely.

Also, so long as it doesn't derail: What would be best for a 486DX-33/66 under DOS? It would be hilarious if I could get even really dunky quality video working.

I know I use to own an MPEG encoder card before, but I never used it. I guess this would give you hardware playback of MPEG1 video only though - but that would be cheating I guess if you are wanting to see how the video will run on older processors.

This is maybe cheating, but at least it's period correct:

I remember there was some video acceleration on the S3 Virge based Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 when we installed it on a Cyrix 6x86. I think the accelerated videos were MPEG-1 but I could be wrong. It's a really distant memory, but as I recall installing the drivers caused some video files to play a lot smoother. There were some video files that demonstrated this on the driver CD, but they were low res so I don't know if this feature was effective for tolerable, full screen worthy resolutions.

I have no idea what the requirements were for this acceleration (primitive as it may be) to work on a given file, but I'm assuming that it must have been a feature of any Virge chip and probably the Trio64 also.

For Pentium 1 machines, you can also get better performances by using a video player like QVpro under DOS or the Xing Mpeg1 player under Windows.

Smacker videos plays very well in DOS on 486 machines.

A similar thread from 2013 with details:

Recommendations for fullscreen video on a 486 DX-66?

I know of Xing MPEG Player, that's a good one. I even have the CD version as a collector's item. ?

As far as I know, it does support DCI and runs on 386 and higher machines.

And I read many years ago about a new version wich claims to have MMX support (I've seen a screenshot).

Never tried this one, though. Does anyone have tried ? Anyway, some graphics cards also had features that assisted video playback.

DCI aside, they also had hardware scaling and YUV conversion. I think this started around the S3 Trio, perhaps also some ISA cards supported this.

Anyway, I heard that some MPEG daughterboards existed. Some of them attached to the VESA connector, perhaps ?

Edit: Thanks for the link! Fronzel's greyscale monitor reminded of WinGIF - it had the ability to use the Windows 3.x colour driver to display 16 shades of gray

(not 50 shades of grey, haha) on a mono screen using fake colours (or on a colour screen, if the VGA belived it is a mono model).

This was really cool, because the VGA mono drivers was.. well.. just mono (black/white). Perhaps it was meant for MCGA.

I got a copy of SoftPEG with my Matrox Mystique card, which I got for my Pentium 133. It was a very good MPEG player, and made use of the hardware upscaling with bilinear filter in YUV space that the Matrox cards implemented. This meant that you could watch VideoCDs even at 1024x768 resolution in 32-bit at full speed. The upscaling was virtually 'free'.

The basic Overlay capabilities were introduced be nearly every manufacturer at that time, e.g.

TSENG with the ET6000

Avance Logic with the ALG2302.A

Oaktech with the OTI64111

Trident with the TGUI9680 ProVidia

ARK Logic with the ARK2000MT

Retronn.de - Vintage Hardware Gallery, Drivers, Guides, Videos. Now with file search

Youtube Channel

FTP Server - Driver Archive and more

DVI2PCIe alignment and 2D image quality measurement tool

Sent me looking for my old "MPC Wizard 2.0" CD, had examples in MS video 1 (CRAM), Indeo and Cinepak - and one my current machine, VLC can play them all.

Indeo looks like the most compact, followed by Cinepak with MS Video 1 bringing up the rear

Well, I used to have my Pentium 1 playing movies that I converted to mpeg1. The conversion was fast (using my Pentium 4), and the quality was acceptable... I was using windows 98 at the time.

These days I have been trying to get avi/divx and mp4/h264 to play in the same Pentium1, this time using DOS. quickviewpro can do it with divx but sound is out of sync. I have yet to try some more with mp4 but I don't have high hopes (even though I am willing to use like a 160x120 version of youtube videos).

The way I see it, there is little point in using any other "old codec" other than mpeg 1. Conversion is very fast with modern computers (you can download a HD movie, and convert it down to VCD quality in about half and hour and watch it in an old pc) and quality is acceptable for what it is. I believe if someone has a good graphics card it will be easier, in my case is a laptop that has only a 2mbs graphics card with no acceleration for video.

1. Small file size (old drives are small we can't waste a lot of space with videos)

2. Acceptable quality (we are not going fr HD of course)

3. Codecs that can be played using Pentium or 486 (I doubt a 386 can play movies). Although I have seen a 286 playing a fullscreen video on youtube (custom software made and it was not really all that great).

I'm currently setting up a computer for a friend. It's only a 486-66, but he wanted stability over compatibility so I'm installing NT 3.51 SP5. My question is, what basic programs will actually run on the O/S? My friend wants AIM (ugg), and IE/OE, so I want to know which versions will work on 3.51. Also, I had heard that there was a beta version of WMP (5.2?), but I'm not sure if its for 3X or NT. If it works, I'll just throw it in too.

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