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

[Stephen Tait]

At 13:12 01/07/2004 +0200, you wrote:
>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).

Fair enough; I've not been using computers long enough to have a P2 of my 
own; all I know is my flatmates ancient P2 350-ish Thinkpad chokes like 
hell on my MPEG4 (typically 640*360 or 640*480 XviD) DVD rips. I find it 
very odd that it choked on MPEG2 before it choked on MPEG4 though...!


>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.

Again, don't have enough experience with chips lacking stuff like this in a 
multimedia environment; all I do now is I avoid celerons like the plague 
(sorry, AMD fanboy!) - I got donated one as a "workstation" (to do lots of 
image processing on the CLI) once. *shudder*

I guess this is another of those "YMMV" posts.. jeepers, it's getting worse 
than "me, too!" ;^)