Problems playing DVDs and MPEG4 movies?
Some SGI320 users have reported problems playing back DVDs or MPEG4 movies. The main problem is colours displaying incorrectly, specifically the display taking on a green cast. The workaround is to enter the Silicon Graphics Advanced setups for the display and set the overlay to use *single* buffer as opposed to double. This should solve the problem.
Does upgrading the SGI320 CPU have any effect on the graphics performance?
Some performance increase based on computation improvement may be seen. However, the Cobalt graphics chipset is the real bottleneck and unfortunately it is not upgradable.
Full Screen DivX under Windows 2000
Playing Full Screen DivX movies under Windows 2000 is painfully slow. Anything over 100% (for example Full Screen video on a 1600 x 1200 desktop) will bring the system to a standstill. This was never a problem under NT. The situation changes little regardless of DirectX version running.
The problem may be due to the Cobalt chipset being unable to use video overlays that are not multiples of 32, a problem shared by a number of other graphic cards (eg. Matrox G400).
The solution is to install DivXG400, a video filter which acts as a filter between the codec and the video renderer (in this case the cobalt driver). This will speed up playback considerably and as a bonus will allow Windows Media Player to read subtitles on a separated file from the video. Make sure that under settings the video renderer is set to ‘always’ so that the filter is used whenever a DivX is played back. For other video files (quicktimes, mpegs, etc) it may be better to turn this off. You can download DivX G400 at www.divx400.com.
SGI320 