h264/Webm/Webp on XP

[danalog]

Any recommended ways of playing newer codec videos on XP? My GT 210 is not doing any of the video work, it's all CPU, which is causing a whole lot of system wide lag. 

Thanks! 

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, Mel0nMan said:

Any recommended ways of playing newer codec videos on XP? My GT 210 is not doing any of the video work, it's all CPU, which is causing a whole lot of system wide lag. 

Thanks! 

As far as I'm aware, its too old. The 210 more than likely only does mpeg2 (aka DVD) decoding - straight up, you need a newer card. Considering your rig has XP - the 650ti would be perfect, and some models don't need a PCIe power connector.

Look at this list and buy one of the models that'd fit your budget - just beware that cards with PCIe gen 3.0 might not work with Gen 1/1.1 (my gtx 650ti and 970 did, R7 240 didn't).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVDEC
 

[danalog]

1 minute ago, Dabombinable said:

As far as I'm aware, its too old. The 210 more than likely only does mpeg2 (aka DVD) decoding - straight up, you need a newer card. Considering your rig has XP - the 650ti would be perfect, and some models don't need a PCIe power connector.

It's SFF, don't think those cards exist.

I have watched videos on Win 7 with that card, H264, and they have worked well and the GPU video usage is above 80%. Pretty sure it's an XP codec support issue? I found a software called MPEG2playback or something like that that bypasses H264 and it works well on the card. 

[Dabombinable]

6 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

It's SFF, don't think those cards exist.

I have watched videos on Win 7 with that card, H264, and they have worked well and the GPU video usage is above 80%. Pretty sure it's an XP codec support issue? I found a software called MPEG2playback or something like that that bypasses H264 and it works well on the card. 

What software are you using to play videos?

Something that might help is called "klite codec pack". I use its predecessor (off an old XP-Vista magazine disc) when running my Core 2 quad desktop. It'll let you know what decoding options are available during install. Also for web browsers, H264ify is what you'd need (only works with YT). Make sure you're using the last driver for your 210 as well (I do remember some breaking video decoding on my 970)

[danalog]

1 minute ago, Dabombinable said:

What software are you using to play videos?

Something that might help is called "klite codec pack". I use its predecessor (off an old XP-Vista magazine disc) when running my Core 2 quad desktop. It'll let you know what decoding options are available during install. Also for web browsers, H264ify is what you'd need (only works with YT). Make sure you're using the last driver for your 210 as well

I was using VLC, latest. This poor thing can't load YT lol. Single core, 2 thread Pentium - I ended up downscaling my videos to MPEG2 1024x768, since that's what the monitor is, and the only video I played on it was a screensaver kinda thing. 

[Dabombinable]

Also @Mel0nManyou could just go with a GT710. Its an upgrade (especially if its the GDDR5 version), and most if not all are low profile as well as extremely cheap second hand (new - not so much).

[danalog]

1 minute ago, Dabombinable said:

Also @Mel0nManyou could just go with a GT710. Its an upgrade (especially if its the GDDR5 version), and most if not all are low profile as well as extremely cheap second hand (new - not so much).

I've got a crap ton of GPUs. Quadro k620s, that sort of thing, that perform like GT 1030s. Thing is I wanted a passive card that I wouldn't stick in a modern system since I refurbish PCs. Had this laying around and it was loads better than the chipset GMA 950. Runs games like I need it to, video is the only issue. Plus this PC has some serious PCIe issues and won't post with most newer VGA cards. 

[Dabombinable]

3 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

I was using VLC, latest. This poor thing can't load YT lol. Single core, 2 thread Pentium - I ended up downscaling my videos to MPEG2 1024x768, since that's what the monitor is, and the only video I played on it was a screensaver kinda thing. 

Ok...now I understand your predicament. Yeah I have the exact same problems with my Pentium 4 laptop (3.2GHz, 1 core 2 threads) - there really won't be much that you can do without replacing the CPU - straight up even a newer card won't decode properly paired with one. Even the cheapest core 2 duo (talking first generation - if compatible with your PC) utterly destroy them at everything.

Just now, Mel0nMan said:

I've got a crap ton of GPUs. Quadro k620s, that sort of thing, that perform like GT 1030s. Thing is I wanted a passive card that I wouldn't stick in a modern system since I refurbish PCs. Had this laying around and it was loads better than the chipset GMA 950. Runs games like I need it to, video is the only issue. Plus this PC has some serious PCIe issues and won't post with most newer VGA cards. 

Those PCIe issues are the same as what my Asus P5KVM based machine had (ran Pentium 4-Core 2 Quad extreme). PCIe 1.1 isn't that forward compatible.

[Beerzerker]

Even something like a 550ti can show those vids, that's what I'm using here and it has no problems showing vids at all.
BTW up to a GTX 960 is viable for XP, that's where the line of support stops for XP as done by Nvidia. Not that XP couldn't support a newer card, Nvidia simply stopped supporting XP beyond a 960.

[danalog]

2 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

Ok...now I understand your predicament. Yeah I have the exact same problems with my Pentium 4 laptop (3.2GHz, 1 core 2 threads) - there really won't be much that you can do without replacing the CPU. Even the cheapest core 2 duo (talking first generation - if compatible with your PC) utterly destroy them at everything.

Yep, I have done a comparison test - this P4 HT 631 versus Core 2 Duo e6400. The C2D destroyed the P4 by 2x the points in Cinebench 15 despite being clocked almost 1ghz lower. 

[Dabombinable]

4 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Yep, I have done a comparison test - this P4 HT 631 versus Core 2 Duo e6400. The C2D destroyed the P4 by 2x the points in Cinebench 15 despite being clocked almost 1ghz lower. 

Quite simply - if you can fit a C2D in the machine and it works, do it. Pentium 4 became e-waste overnight when Conroe launched and hold everything back.

[danalog]

2 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

Quite simply - if you can fit a C2D in the machine and it works, do it. Pentium 4 became e-waste overnight when Conroe launched and hold everything back.

Cannot sadly. Best it supports is Pentium 671, still crap. Basically the whole point of this machine is Outlook '04 so I can sync with my PDA. 

[thrasher_565]

3 hours ago, Beerzerker said:

Even something like a 550ti can show those vids, that's what I'm using here and it has no problems showing vids at all.
BTW up to a GTX 960 is viable for XP, that's where the line of support stops for XP as done by Nvidia. Not that XP couldn't support a newer card, Nvidia simply stopped supporting XP beyond a 960.

well there are modded drivers for a 980ti funny der8auer EN did a video on it haha

 

 

 

[Beerzerker]

1 hour ago, thrasher_565 said:

well there are modded drivers for a 980ti funny der8auer EN did a video on it haha

 

 

 

Well Ha-Ha to you too....

Just know Der8auer tends to use drivers the public at large cannot get their hands on because if they were publicly available I'd have a copy of those myself already.
What he used here may or may not be an actual BETA but there are also some modded files/drivers they custom-brew too.

These are "In-House" files; be it a driver, BIOS or even a piece of tweaking software.

Since these guys are competing to stay on top they tend to NOT let these out of the bag to keep their competitive edge. Some of these custom drivers are done by the company that made the cards and these drivers ARE NOT allowed to be shared, you will not find them archived anywhere period. Same goes for a custom competition BIOS for the card(s) in use to provide essentially no limits to voltage and whatever else.

Whatever they need, it will either be made available by whomever or created in-house as a driver/BIOS/Tweaking mod.

In this case the mod he did with the driver only proves what I said above, it's not that XP cannot run these cards, it's that Nvidia ended public (Official) XP support with the 960 cards.
And unless you have a link to an XP driver that will support these in XP, what you point out in your post isn't of much use or value anyway aside from being just a mention about it.

[thrasher_565]

1 hour ago, Beerzerker said:

Well Ha-Ha to you too....

Just know Der8auer tends to use drivers the public at large cannot get their hands on because if they were publicly available I'd have a copy of those myself already.
What he used here may or may not be an actual BETA but there are also some modded files/drivers they custom-brew too.

These are "In-House" files; be it a driver, BIOS or even a piece of tweaking software.

Since these guys are competing to stay on top they tend to NOT let these out of the bag to keep their competitive edge. Some of these custom drivers are done by the company that made the cards and these drivers ARE NOT allowed to be shared, you will not find them archived anywhere period. Same goes for a custom competition BIOS for the card(s) in use to provide essentially no limits to voltage and whatever else.

Whatever they need, it will either be made available by whomever or created in-house as a driver/BIOS/Tweaking mod.

In this case the mod he did with the driver only proves what I said above, it's not that XP cannot run these cards, it's that Nvidia ended public (Official) XP support with the 960 cards.
And unless you have a link to an XP driver that will support these in XP, what you point out in your post isn't of much use or value anyway aside from being just a mention about it.

hmm that's probably true and good point. i think there are public 980ti xp drivers i was looking building the ultamit xp pc and found them i think but some times it may say they work but dont...

 

i been messing with 98se and pcie cards and same thing applys finding modded drivers. i have a 8800 gt and drivers that say they work but probably wont work. its ok my 850xt should be fine.  im stumped on usb drivers atm on my 98se build... so stupid...

[LAwLz]

The GT210 has PureVideo HD (aka VP4) so it can hardware accelerate decoding of some formats. I am not sure what it's limited to though.

I recommend you download and run DXVA Checker. It will give you a detailed list of exactly what your GPU supports, including formats and resolutions.

Since your CPU is kind of crap, you will not want to play any format other than those that your GPU supports. I think WebM will be a no-go since that's always VP8 or VP9. Your CPU should be able to cope with WebP though.

 

 

 

I am fairly sure VLC only supports DXVA2, and XP only has DXVA. That's probably why you aren't getting it to work in VLC. 

I am fairly sure LAVFilters allowed you to specify CUVID as their decoder. That should behave similar to DXVA if i recall correctly. Also, mpv with --hwdec=cuda might work, although you might not even have to set that since "auto" should find it.

[Beerzerker]

6 hours ago, thrasher_565 said:

hmm that's probably true and good point. i think there are public 980ti xp drivers i was looking building the ultamit xp pc and found them i think but some times it may say they work but dont...

 

i been messing with 98se and pcie cards and same thing applys finding modded drivers. i have a 8800 gt and drivers that say they work but probably wont work. its ok my 850xt should be fine.  im stumped on usb drivers atm on my 98se build... so stupid...

Any drivers that works with Win 95/98 should work fine but think about how new USB was back then.
It's not as simple/stupid to get drivers working in early Windows versions as it is now.
You may also need to try more than one version and frankly, Win ME was decent with USB so the drivers for it may be the solution here. You can use those because drivers after ME came out were for all three variants of Windows (95,98/98SE and ME).

[mariushm]

Older versions of Media Player Classic - Home Cinema  should work fine on Windows XP 

 

I think version 1.7.13 is the last that supports Windows XP : https://filehippo.com/download_mpc-hc/1.7.13.0.0/

 

Not sure if it supports webm.... I think webm was already as a thing in 2019 when this version was released, so it should work. 

 

Ignore what is said on the website ... player isn't "dead", they still release new versions but only on Doom9 forum ... they no longer update the website.

[thrasher_565]

12 hours ago, Beerzerker said:

Any drivers that works with Win 95/98 should work fine but think about how new USB was back then.
It's not as simple/stupid to get drivers working in early Windows versions as it is now.
You may also need to try more than one version and frankly, Win ME was decent with USB so the drivers for it may be the solution here. You can use those because drivers after ME came out were for all three variants of Windows (95,98/98SE and ME).

ya its odd. i have 4 other mbs that all have working usb drivers with 98se... but the 2 mbs that i got dont...  i even install the os by the flash drive...i followed the guys video and got the same mb and usb works for him...im starting to think its the flash drive. i ordered and 256mb drive and just got an 8gb usb 2.0 drive ill try that. my others were 16gb and 32 gb usb 3.0 so maybe that it?

i got an floppy emulator and managed to get and old 1gb drive to work with it but limited to small size files. the 98se patch wont fit and that has usb driver on it too.

keyboard and mouse work but i need a flash drive to work to install stuff. i want 4 cores dam it haha its sapos to be the  ultimate 98 se build...

i do have an e8600 if i cant get the other 2 to work... my 6800 ultra has a 5200+ best i could find. the ultra rare 775 agp mbs are like $350+

Edited January 14, 2022 by thrasher_565

[Zodiark1593]

On 1/12/2022 at 6:37 PM, Dabombinable said:

As far as I'm aware, its too old. The 210 more than likely only does mpeg2 (aka DVD) decoding - straight up, you need a newer card. Considering your rig has XP - the 650ti would be perfect, and some models don't need a PCIe power connector.

Look at this list and buy one of the models that'd fit your budget - just beware that cards with PCIe gen 3.0 might not work with Gen 1/1.1 (my gtx 650ti and 970 did, R7 240 didn't).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVDEC
 

The GT 210 can decode h.264. However, YouTube by default does not serve h.264. Youtube defaults to VP9, which was well beyond when the GT 210 was made.

 

OP needs to force Youtube to serve H.264 video to be able to decode it on the card. Though even then, a single-core P4 may still run into issues. Even compared to things like AMD's Bulldozer, and Intel's many Lake iterations, the P4 was kind of Hot Garbage back when it was current, let alone some 16 years later. Dark days indeed.

 

As far as VLC goes, some quick searching seems to tell me that Windows XP does not support the DXVA that VLC uses to decode video in hardware.

 

Without spending money, I'd probably give some Linux distro a try if at all feasible. You'd likely have better luck with hardware decoding on a modern Linux OS. Though, there is a bit of a learning curve to getting it up and running, on the other hand, it's a lot less daunting than trying to get Linux to run games.

 

If the whole point of the machine is to sync to a PDA, why bother trying to play video on it? For fun, perhaps? Genuinely curious, as I'd also ran stuff on machines that had no business doing so.

 

[mariushm]

16 hours ago, thrasher_565 said:

ya its odd. i have 4 other mbs that all have working usb drivers with 98se... but the 2 mbs that i got dont...  i even install the os by the flash drive...i followed the guys video and got the same mb and usb works for him...im starting to think its the flash drive. i ordered and 256mb drive and just got an 8gb usb 2.0 drive ill try that. my others were 16gb and 32 gb usb 3.0 so maybe that it?

i got an floppy emulator and managed to get and old 1gb drive to work with it but limited to small size files. the 98se patch wont fit and that has usb driver on it too.

keyboard and mouse work but i need a flash drive to work to install stuff. i want 4 cores dam it haha its sapos to be the  ultimate 98 se build...

i do have an e8600 if i cant get the other 2 to work... my 6800 ultra has a 5200+ best i could find. the ultra rare 775 agp mbs are like $350+

You can get cheap 4 -8 GB IDE SSDs from eBay and they'll work with Windows 98.   There's  also small SATA SSDs you could use with ide-sata converters but that costs more.

 

With ancient small capacity hard drives, I'd just make a bootable usb 6.22 floppy disk, format the drive to fat32, do sys A: c: and fdisk /fixmbr or whatever the command is to make the drive bootable , and copy the windows 98se files into a folder like win98se for example

Then you restart pc and boot from drive straight into command.com and you can go in win98se folder and install windows.

 

You can get those dos bootable disk images from WinWorld or whatever ... maybe even FreeDOS could work but not sure, not tested in a long time, and windows 98 setup may complain about dos version.

 

examples of drives : 16$ for 4 GB , 20$ for 16 GB  MLC IDE drives (40 pin or if 44 pin  you can use 44 - 40 pin adapters for regular ide 40 pin / 80 pin) : https://www.ebay.com/itm/333540449924

 

8.9$ for 4 GB 44 pin SSD : https://www.ebay.com/itm/224512201931

 

other 44 pin drives : https://www.ebay.com/itm/254693230262 https://www.ebay.com/itm/273817819256

 

44 pin to 40 pin + molex adapters : https://www.ebay.com/itm/270838744105