[mythtv-users] Lowest cpu to play dvd and divx

[Gert van der Knokke]

Stephen Tait wrote:

> From personal experience, I'd guess you'll get good playback on MPEG2 
> (DVD's) but abysmal performance on any MPEG4 (XviD, DivX)
>
Hmm, I beg to differ :-)

On my Dotstation with a 400 MHz Celeron all my Divx files played fine as 
did the recorded stuff from the old bttv card. When I switched to the 
PVR250 the resulting (far better quality) MPEG2 stream proved too much 
for the Celeron (frame skipping, audio hickups) and I had to install a 1 
GHz CPU (alas running at a 'cool' 666 MHz since the board refuses to set 
the busclock higher than 66 MHz for a Celeron...)
Since then playback of recorded material is flawless (720x576).

Seems that the higher bitrates of MPEG2 are just too much for the lower 
speed Celerons, also they lack SSE(2) support which has quite some 
impact too.

Gert