720p on old machine

[LinkeLoutje]

Hey guys I'm wondering whether it would be possible to play any 720p file on my old setup? I have an AMD Athlon 2400+, Asus A7V8X-X board with 512mb and a Ati Radeon 9600pro. Audio should be optical (5.1) to my receiver.

I was thinking about installing OpenELEC or Geexbox. What do you think?

Thnx

[jagabo]

720p what? What frame rate? What codecs?

[LinkeLoutje]

As good as it gets :P Basically I was hoping to be able to download just any type of 720p file and play it. Most often these are encode via h264 right?

[AlanHK]

I've got an antique Athlon 1700 and I can play 720p MKVs on it smoothly with VLC.

Just download a short film and try it.

[jagabo]

Basically I was hoping to be able to download just any type of 720p file and play it

Any 720p file? Then, no.

Most often these are encode via h264 right?

Yes.

You should be able to play 720p24 MPEG 2 and h.264 if the bitrate/complexity isn't too high. If you replaced the graphics card with something newer you could use GPU h.264 decoding (DXVA in Windows) to play higher frame rates, eg 720p60. But not all h.264 features are supported by DXVA. So you'll still have problems with some files (some people crank x264 setting all the way up, creating files with properties not supported by DXVA, Blu-ray players, etc.).

[Hoser Rob]

If you're running windows xp the file system doesn't support files >4Gb. Which isn't too hard to exceed with 720p video.

I don't think newer versions of vlc would work all that well on older hardware because you can't set up a cache for local files. I use smplayer with the local file stream cache set to 8192Kb.

Also with smplayer, if you try it go into the advanced settings and enter under mplayer arguments:

-cache-min 30

This will force the player to always use at least 30% of the file stream cache. It slows down loading but really makes a performance difference.

I'm usually running smplayer on somewhat newer hardware but it's a middle of the road i3 with integrated intel gpu. And the performance is much better than vlc's. Handles problem codecs better too.

[Island_Dweller]

If you're running windows xp the file system doesn't support files >4Gb. Which isn't too hard to exceed with 720p video.

Eh??

I regularly played 20-40 GB movie-only mkv bluray backups on windows xp. I only updated to win 7 x64 about 2 months ago. Maybe you meant FAT32 can't support files >4GB, in which case, you can convert your drive to NTFS file system ?

[jagabo]

Yes, XP supports NTFS and files over 4 GB. It's FAT32 that's limited to 4 GB. WinME, Win98, and Win95 didn't support NTFS.

[Cornucopia]

Yes, XP supports NTFS and files over 4 GB. It's FAT32 that's limited to 4 GB. WinME, Win98, and Win95 didn't support NTFS.

...by default. There were 3rd party FS drivers that allowed working with NTFS (as well as other FS's like Mac HFS, etc).

@Hoser Rob, maybe you're thinking of v1-type AVI files, which had a 2GB or 4GB limit (although the OpenDML spec of v2 opened them up to ~unlimited).

Scott

[Hoser Rob]

I give ... I'm losing my windows xp chops. Hardly used win7 in the last year.

[hello_hello]

I don't think newer versions of vlc would work all that well on older hardware because you can't set up a cache for local files. I use smplayer with the local file stream cache set to 8192Kb.

Yes you can. It's in the Input/Codecs section.

Also with smplayer, if you try it go into the advanced settings and enter under mplayer arguments:

-cache-min 30

This will force the player to always use at least 30% of the file stream cache. It slows down loading but really makes a performance difference.

Sounds like nonsense to me. How does reading the video directly from disc as opposed to reading it from disc, storing it in RAM, and then reading it from there, slow the speed at which the CPU can decode the video? The main reason for the cache, I assume, would be so there's no need to rely on the hard drive keeping up if it's also busy doing other things. But assuming you have 5 seconds of video in cache, how does increasing it to 10 seconds improve performance? How is it allowing the CPU to decode the video faster?
Plus if the player has to load 30 minutes of video into RAM before it started playing it'd take forever. I suspect it's more likely to start playing and then keep reading ahead to fill the cache, but I suspect most players do a similar thing. I don't think MPC-HC even has a cache setting, which is probably a good thing as it'd stop people who don't really know they're doing from fiddling with it (ie me), but many times I've been watching video off an external drive, had a brain-dead moment and unplugged the drive, yet the video will keep playing for 5 or 10 minutes before it stops.

I'm usually running smplayer on somewhat newer hardware but it's a middle of the road i3 with integrated intel gpu. And the performance is much better than vlc's. Handles problem codecs better too.

Sometimes I think the placebo effect gets less credit than it deserves. What's a problem codec?

[LinkeLoutje]

I was hoping to install a lightweight distribution such as GeexBox or OpenELEC on the computer and then play via XBMC. I've managed to install GeexBox (OpenELEC failed time and time again), but unfortunately the video has been lagging a lot. I'm not very experienced with such distributions, but I suppose performance with XP would not be any better.

I don't know if there's anything I can do to improve performance on the software side, but I presume the answer is, unfortunately, a simple no...