17 06 2003
Last night was a total geek-out night.
While watching a DivX 3 encoded copy of Blade on Murdoch, I installed Win98 on a co-worker’s home computer and started playing around with a demo version of Poser 5 while sipping on a Creemore. ahhhhhh……
My Murdoch project is better than ever. After Sigma Designs released the Beta 2.0 drivers for the Xcard, I could sort-of play older Divx content on my old P200. However, when things got really complicated - lots of motion or colour changes - then the new drivers would fail and start stuttering the audio and video.
After installing a 3rd Party app called “JovePlayer“, things went much better. I had previously avoided installing JovePlayer 2.1 since it has much higher system requirements than what is inside Murdoch. Up until now, the more barebones ver. 1.1 was on my system and still ran slowly - but gave me what I needed.
Last night I threw caution to the wind and installed JovePlayer 2.1 anyway (I’m a WILd mAn!). Turns out the software not only runs faster than 1.1, but looks better, is more customizable, and even plays the older DivX 3 content better than the stand-alone drivers. There’s still the occasional slowdown or skipping, but it’s far less often.
Another benefit is the fast-forward and rewind skipping works better under JovePlayer 2.1 than the Sigma Designs software. It usually sync’s up right away, or within a second or two… even faster than the Xcard Player.
The big selling point for the Xcard is how you can play AVIs and Windows Media files that aren’t supported by the Xcard hardware, but it requires a very, very fast computer. Luckily, there’s a way to turn this feature off so it doesn’t try to make my poor, clock-challenged Pentium One run complicated functions.
After shelling out over a hundred bucks for the hardware, I was not ready to pass out another $20 US. Especially for software that has features that I should have gotten with the card. However, $20 US was over $32 Cdn. just a few short months ago… but with the dollar bordering on 75 cents now, it’s almost $26 Cdn. How can I pass up a sale like that?!?
