Arch Linux

Cotton

Member

From: Cornwall, UK

Registered: 2004-09-17

Posts: 568

Lightest app for HD playback on old CPU?

What's the best solution for playing 720p (and maybe 1080p?) on a old machine containing a Barton 3000+ ?
The graphics card is a GeForce 6800 Ultra.

I need to know whether it is worth resurrecting the machine before I try this.

Last edited by Cotton (2010-03-28 10:43:40)

gtklocker

Member

Registered: 2009-09-01

Posts: 462

Re: Lightest app for HD playback on old CPU?

I'm interested in it, too.

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,607

Re: Lightest app for HD playback on old CPU?

Hmm, I'm not familiar with the Barton. How fast is it, compared to a Pentium-M or an Atom? Those processors can do 720p, but just barely. If the Barton is slower than those two, you're out of luck. You can't use your graphic card either, VDPAU is only supported on Geforce 8 and up. Your solutions are either buy a cheap Geforce 8 card, or maybe the Broadcom CrystalHD card. But I believe the graphic card would be cheaper, and more supported too, the only app for now that supports CrystalHD is XBMC.

.:B:.

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2006-11-26

Posts: 5,819

Website

Re: Lightest app for HD playback on old CPU?

Get a Broadcom CrystalHD card, a miniPCI-E to PCI-E adapter, or get a GeForce 8x00 series GPU (for vdpau).  The former may not be the cheapest option but is definitely the most power-efficient one.

Edit: I see that was already posted . At least I got to say they can almost exclusively be found in miniPCI-E format .

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Vortex375

Member

Registered: 2009-02-24

Posts: 62

Re: Lightest app for HD playback on old CPU?

The lightest and fastest app for playing HD video is probably mplayer.

It's also the only one that can handle multi-threading and hardware decoding properly (at least with Nvidia cards). Not that it matters on that old hardware, though.

bt

Member

Registered: 2007-04-11

Posts: 198

Re: Lightest app for HD playback on old CPU?

I have an XFX Geforce 6800GT, and a Barton 2700 with 500M of ram. I also have a Dvico Fusion HDTV7 RT Gold ota card. I am in New York with a 30 storey apartment house separating me from a direct line to the Empire State Building which is now being use to broadcast since the World Trade Center came down. I was told there was no way for me to receive HDTV over the air. Instead, I  receive every station  with perfect reception 98 percent of the time. The other times are weather related. I use vlc for reception of the hdtv stations, and for a playlist I use channels.conf from xine which I copied to my /home/~ directory.

Babets

Member

Registered: 2008-02-07

Posts: 47

Re: Lightest app for HD playback on old CPU?

mplayer-mt?

esters

Member

Registered: 2006-11-04

Posts: 173

Re: Lightest app for HD playback on old CPU?

What good does a multithreaded version of mplayer do when Barton was the newest and also the last brand of Athlon XP CPUs, which lacked the support of SSE2 (Which is a must for very CPU intensive codecs like H264). I think you should try out mplayer + CoreAVC and if remember correctly then the 6800 series do not have hardware accelerated video playback - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purevideo# … HD%29_GPUs so there aren't a lot of options left.

Last edited by esters (2010-03-28 20:19:40)

Echo

Member

From: Ohio, United States

Registered: 2006-05-16

Posts: 239

Re: Lightest app for HD playback on old CPU?

mplayer should work passing certain player options. --framedrop should help if you get a little stutter...