Is my laptop too slow to play anime?

I have been watching anime on my desktop for some time but for some reason I can't seem to get the files to play on my laptop very well. I was ondering if someone could give me some ideas as to what to do as far as codecs and a player that might work on my laptop or is it just too slow. My lap top is an ibm think pad 366mhz with a 128mb of memory. I have played anime on it before but it doesnt do well. I'll be able to watch one episode than after a while my computer just refuses to play the avi files. I can watch movie avi files just fine but i'm having trouble with anime avi files. currently i have window 98. I have also vlc and the original media player both at the moment will only play sound but not video. I beleive i have the divx, xvid and ffdshow codecs all installed so not sure what i need to do, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

your laptop is too slow, and you should consider a new one if you're going to do multimedia stuff on it.

But anyway, with the sub-500mhz laptop, you should probably not bother with xvid/divx, and just use ffdshow. xvid's and divx's playback filters are both more cpu intensive than ffdshow.

vlc uses its own, to the best of my knowledge. If I remember correctly it uses its own implementation of libavcodec, and doesn't need other codecs to plug into it to play stuff. It's pretty optimized and pretty lightweight, so if you're having trouble at the point you are probably not going to have much success beyond it.

I think anime is pretty cpu-intensive in general, because of the bright, solid colors and clean motion. When a movie loses some information, you don't really notice because you wouldn't notice anyway. When anime loses the same information, you'll notice faster, so it has to lose less, and encode smarter, making it harder to decode. At least, so I think, I could be wrong.