Have Win95 on an old laptop and desktop and would like to put a media player on them to watch some mkv ogm avi and divx video files. Does anyone know of one that will work on such an old OS. I tried Zoom player and VLC but they all required DLLs or supporting software that I couldn't get loaded (for one DLL I was told to upgrade the OS).
MediaPlayer Classic (part of the K-lite codec pack) is reported to install and run on win95, but installing codecs for very new media types like mkv etc will always be hit and miss with such an obsolete OS. If the machine has less than 32MB ram it's not going to do a good job of video anyway.. If it has 32 then an upgrade to 98 may be feasable.. or even building a dedicated linux media system from a stripped down core installation. If it's a pentium 133 or below (I have an IBM 386sx lappy) then don't even bother.. I can tell you from bitter experience they are never worth the time and trouble it takes attempting to upgrade them.. Pentium2 266 with 64MB ram is about minimum for fullscreen video players... best use for antique mid 90's hardware is playing windows95 and dos classic games. At that they excel.
Thanks much. Both machines are P100 so might try the Linux option. Concerned then about converting the files to Linux compatible. Digging in my memory and thinking I tried something called Samba (?) for converting Windows files to Linux compatible with no success a couple of years ago. Appreciate the advice. I have tried some of the older versions of Real, Quicktime, and MediaPlayer but you are right about the codecs, they only deal with avi it looks like and have had no luck even with that. Again thank you for the sound advice.
