Is it possible to run dvd movies on a toshiba portege 3110 300mhz with 128 megs of ram? I have seen advertised software that is a mpeg2 decoder that will work with computers at 266mhz. Any thoughts. Thanks

it'll play the movie, but it'll be choppy, skip frames, audio and video out of sync...

Get the decoder card, a DVD will look horrid on anything less then 800MHZ with a pre-geforce2 G/C.

nomore, I dont know what there talking about but my Compaq Presario 5630 (Pentium 2 351 MHz) plays DVD's excellently. You dont need a million megahertz, to do those tasks. Just try it out. You wont be dissapointed.

Ok, ok, DVDs can run on a PII 300, thats when DVD players came out, thats all people had. But if you sit a slower PC next to a hardware DVD player (by this, I lean the VCR-style sing-unit things) you notice a lot of difference, the difference only becomes less notible when the PC reaches the specs I said, and even then it wont be able to decode SPDIF sound fast enough, so no 5.1 Joni

Yep. People don't seem to realise that the quality of the picture is directly related to the speed/quality of the decompression. I played my Kevin and Perry Go Large DVD on our Athlon 1 gig machine. Firstly with Software DVD player, and then with the bundled software that came with my Geforce2 GLADIAC. The difference was, software was noticeably different, poorer quality, blacks were pixelly, picture was not as sharp, etc. With the hardware support, crisp as you like! Having said that, p300mhz and DVD?s Well, I tried that and it is choppy/out of sync audio. The guy with the laptop with a DVD porbably has graphics chip with mpeg2 support. You might do too, but you might not. One way or another, you will need it. P300 mhz is not enough to play DVD's with software only.