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Video Playback Confusion

F

fantasma

n00b
Joined
Dec 13, 2009
Messages
5
Hi, I recently bought a new HDTV, it's my first one. I used to use xbox media center to stream movies to my TV, but unfortunately xbox wasn't made for HDTVs. Xbox 360 is, but the 360 software won't play mkv files and several other formats. So I planned to use an old computer to get HD stuff to my HDTV using a DVI to HDMI cable.
Here are the specs:
AMD 64 3000+
1GB DDR400
Radeon 9600 (128MB)

Unfortunately this was not powerful enough to play 1080p without skipping. I tried using both windows and linux using several different media players and outputs, but nothing worked. So what I did was buy a media player box, I bought the Asus O!Play media player, it costs $100 and has HDMI output. The software for this player is terrible but the bottom line is it can play 1080p movies smoothly.
Here of the specs of the Asus O!Play Box:
Linux 2.6.12 Kernel
128MB memory, 8MB Shared for video
MIPS 24K V7.4, 300MhZ

I want to know why is it that this tiny media box is capable of playing 1080p movies and my AMD 64 is not capable. Am I doing something wrong? Anybody have any ideas?
 
The media box is a device with specialized hardware built for video decoding and nothing else. It excels at one thing, and does poorly at everything else.

Your A64 box probably won't play 1080p smoothly. Instead of the media box, you could have also built an HTPC for about $250-300.
 
fantasma said:
I want to know why is it that this tiny media box is capable of playing 1080p movies and my AMD 64 is not capable. Am I doing something wrong? Anybody have any ideas?
Click to expand...

because the media box has hardware designed to handle 1080p video. your pc doesn't. you could have bought a new video card for less then $50, and all your media problems would have gone away.
 
nobody has given me a good explination yet as to how a 300mhz processor with no gpu can be programmed so well to handle 1080p video but a 1.8ghz processor with a gpu can't handle it...
 
Speed is irrelevant. You're comparing apples and oranges.. though not that it matters because that processor isn't the one doing the decoding. The reason why it's better is because the Asus O!Play uses Realtek's RTD128X DMP which does all the work, as opposed to having software do the work.
 
Overhead, and quality.

Is the ASUS box really streaming it at a full 40mbits?

Or is it cutting corners? (then upscaling it)
I dunno, and don't care to check.


And finally, for ATi cards (and nVidia, though some codecs choose to use CUDA instead) have a tiny bit of dedicated hardware to play videos, they don't use the main GPU part of the GPU (no SP used).
 
fantasma said:
nobody has given me a good explination yet as to how a 300mhz processor with no gpu can be programmed so well to handle 1080p video but a 1.8ghz processor with a gpu can't handle it...
Click to expand...

Jesus Fucking Christ. Krupted already answered that. Because things like Popcorn Hour and the Asus thing you have all have a special card/chip in them that is made to handle video decoding. :rolleyes:

And you know what? Video cards have something similar too which is why I said not to bother with an AGP video card since only the PCIe cards are the only ones that have it. :rolleyes:
 
krupted said:
argh! dont tell OP he cant do what he can! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133245 (im guessing anyway, im not sure about this cards video playback accelleration, but cuda seems to be there so it should be right)
Click to expand...

AMD/ATI also advertised their 2000 series AGP cards has having Avivo and capable of hardware acceleration but they weren't.

Just cause it supports Cuda doesn't mean it's capable of doing full hardware acceleration. Not all 8400GS cards are even capable of that, only the PCIe 2.0 cards are.

Also, I can tell him he can't do whatever he wants because of the reality of the situation. His CPU is way, way, painfully slow to do Blu Ray decoding on it's own and his GPU won't help. All of his parts being way, way, painfully old aren't going to help. That's the reality.
 
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