PC

I have a PC:
Celeron 434Mhz,
320MB Ram,
and I am considering buying a Radeon 9250 and a DvD drive to make use of it as a little entertainment centre type thing. is it worth it?

I think it's a little underpowered CPU wise to decode modern video codecs.  I'd recommond at least a P3 500 as the absolute bare minimum.

are you sure about that?

I'm not sure that Celeron processor will be able to handle what is now considered basic multimedia tasks. I had a laptop with a 433 MHz Celeron a while back and it could barely handle WMVs and other video files above 320x resolution. The only thing is that if you do buy those components, you can always move them from one machine to your next. You WILL need to replace that old Celeron soon, that much is certain.

I already have replaced it, I'm just trying to put the old box to use. also, rather than getting a radeon 9250 I've found an nVidia Geforce FX5200 for about half the price (lol online stores) so I'm getting that instead, and bumping the DVD drive up to a DVD/CDRW Combo drive. again, I ask, will this work for me? I know I used to watch some pretty good WMVs on that computer a before with the video card it already has (an nVidia Riva 128) and considerably less ram than it has now so I'm kinda sceptical about it not working, but I still would like a second opinion

The video card doesnt do anything during video playback unless it specifically has support for encoding/decoding certain formats, like MPEG streams.

When you decode DivX/Xvid your CPU just decodes directly into a video RAM buffer, totally bypassing any type of processing by the video card.

If the CPU can't decode fast enough it won't play normal. Last time I looked the minimum recommended for DivX playback was a P3 500mhz. h.264 and other modern codecs probably won't play back at sufficient speed on your machine.

My Pentium 2 300MHz laptop with 2MB of video RAM (neomagic) plays video okay with Mplayer's xv video output plugin (overlay) if the video is small enough. I have to play 640x480 videos with X11 which does not allow fullscreen (1024x768) playback.

So, make sure your card has enough RAM to play DVD video (it probably will) and make sure your CPU is fast enough to play DVDs (it might not be) and you should be fine.

You might want to be sure you've got a decent hard drive, too, in case you want to play large videos from disk, so you don't get stuttering during playback.

in case anyone cares (which I somehow doubt, but anyway) I've got the parts, and it's all working fine. take THAT, doubting thomas!

yup, christening it with it's first DVD, Roy Orbison's Black & White. it's running perfectly fine, although I can't see much else going on while it plays.