AniDB

Yeah, the title says it. I'm usin windows media player 9 and all the anime i've tried to play on it is is not keeping up with the sound and it's skipping. Is it because of my old 550Mhz AMD K6? I'm using an old refurbished computer. I'm assuming it's a hardware problem 'cuz i'm using all the current codecs. I've tried media player classic but it didn't help. I'll list my specs here:

windows xp pro
550 AMD K6
256MB PC100 sdram
geforce 2 mx 400 (64mb)
maxtor 6.4 GB hard drive(took from an old IBM, i'm assuming its 5400rpm, at the most)
sound blaster live!
52x24x52 cdrw drive

I'm assuming it's the cpu, 'cuz my 2000 athlon system plays everything fine. Can anyone recommend me an alternative player or solution to this other than replacing the hardware?

before starting playing an anime, open the task manager, and then start the media player.
I don't think a 550 should be too low to play videos, but try watching if the cpu utilization by wmplayer is at 99. If so, I'm sorry to say that it is the cpu that can't keep up.

If it's the CPU-usage, try disabling all postprocessing-options in the divx- and xvid-decoder.

Btw, it might help to experiment with different decoders, for example ffdshow:
Version on sourceforge, might not work with some newer encodes:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow/
Latest alphas, but they might crash - only try those if the above version doesn't help:
http://athos.leffe.dnsalias.com/

At 550 Mhz, it might be impossible to avoid some skipping. Just to check, are there any other programs running besides the video player? If so, exit all of them and make sure that the harddisk is not being used (much) by any other program.

thanks guys. I've NEVER touched the settings on the divx and xvid codecs before now(nor did I have to). Disabling the post processing option helped alot. Although the skipping stille exists, its in an 'acceptable' drawback now.