DivX video freezing

Factual Questions
1

I have a couple of AVI video files on my computer, such as Snatch and American History X, ect. … just normal movies at 690 or so MB (decent quality). Now, my system is fairly old and outdated by 4 years (Dell), except for a memory & hard drive upgrade and OS upgrade (Win 2000). Most of the time I can watch these movies, and when I do, the memory is barely reaching 25% capacity. But the CPU is cranking between 97% and 100% the whole time (according to the Task Mgr.). The videos usually run fine for hours with the CPU running that full. I watch these movies with DivX Player 2.0 Alpha (By the way, is this the free best player for these files?). Every once in a while the program will freeze up, saying “abnormal termination” or something along those lines and there is nothing I can do to play past a certain point in the movie. I have a Pentium 3 in my system (not sure of speed).

Question is: Why can’t my processor handle this? Am I using the wrong player? I have a decent system that is functioning properly otherwise, why can’t I play these files without using my CPU to capacity and risking a freeze-up every time?

Thanks for your help.

2

Try this: DivX video download. Alpha software can’t always be trusted; give the release version a try. That page lists the DivX player version as 2.1.

3

I DL’ed that newer version. Now all the movies run with 40% CPU and no freezes so far! Thanks!

4

U just download the DivX codec and use Windows Mplayer 2 or PowerDVD players and it seems to work fine.

5

U should be “I”: I just download the DivX codec and use Windows Mplayer 2 or PowerDVD players and it seems to work fine.