Dumbing Down Divx

[Eric_Holtz]

I'm not to sure if im asking this question on the Wright board, but this one seems to be the most appropriate.

I've just finished downloading a film (Tomb Raider) and its of high quality and DivX encoded. Because my computer is quite old and dated the film can't play on it properly.

So, I was wandering if theirs anyway of dumbing it down so it will play on my machine? Are there any programs that can do that? Can it be done at all?

[Livy]

only things i can think of are, defraging your hard drive, as not to cause to much disk usage, make sure everything is closed when u play the movie, even anti virus and firewall, turn your colour bit down to 16bit( i heard this will help somewhere.)

[ilw]

i used to have this problem and the only sure fire method would be to reencode it, but that takes quite a while (especially when the computer is old).
The best thing to try (that doesn't take ages) is to close down as many programs as possible, then use bsplayer to watch the film (it uses less resources than any other decent player). Also in the options section of bsplayer, turn down the amount of post processing that is done and turn down 'film effect' as both of these make your cpu work harder.
A couple of final things to try,but often don't help are:
1) Go into task manager and raise the priority of the bsplayer process (only raise it one level or maybe 2, after that it'll start getting worse)
2) Don't expand the video to fullscreen, instead watch it at its original size (this sucks a bit and often doesn't help)

[Eric_Holtz]

Thanks for all the help, the bsplayer seems to have done the trick (just about).

I'm still open to any more suggestions though; here are my specs if they make any difference?

266MGHZ, 124RAM, 3D Accelerator Card: Prophet II MX PCI

[ilw]

I think u're gonna have problems with quite a lot of movies. Theres not much u can do short of upgrading your computer. If u can't afford that, then stick to downloading films that are quite small in size/minute (ie of lower quality) Don't go for 2 cd rips of films (unless the film is really long like titanic) as these are the films u r most likely to be able to play.
Or if u have a dvd player, find out if it can play vcd's or svcd's, if it can u can download any film u like and convert it to one of these formats and play it on your dvd player. (though the conversions may take some time on your computer)

[Eric_Holtz]

Believe it or not, those are the specs after upgrading! The motherboard can’t take any more!

It'll be a good two months before I can buy a new machine. I do however have a standalone DVD player with VCD compatibility, do you have a rough idea on how long It would take to convert a film to VCD?

Any recommendations on software/programs for the conversion?