Hardware video playback - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

blizzak · 03-06-2005, 12:59 PM

Hey people. Not sure if I should post there here or in electronics, but here we go.

I've got a old celeron 700 with a radeon 7000 in it working as my tv-out box/server. Usually end up putting movies on it (700 meg divx) and watching them perfectly fine, although some of them that have a higher bitrate tend to chop, and fullscreen movies have real trouble. So my question is does anyone know what the best hardware utilizing playback program is?

For example, I have a dvd-rom installed and powerdvd 5 on the system, with hardware acceleration turned on. The dvd's still tend to chop sometimes in powerdvd, so I installed the ati dvd player, which i'm told uses the full capabilities of the video card. Sure enough, DVD's worked PERFECTLY when I installed and used it. This leads me to believe that fileplaying software works in a similar fashion; some using a lot of hardware and some using almost purely software decoding. Although I guess it has to do with the codec that the video uses as well...so perhaps only a faster processor would help. Does anyone have any insight as to something that would speed up my computer's video playback? When my friend gets home i'm gonna try the ati file player that he has the cd for; perhaps that would be the best for hardware utilization. Thanks.

skaven · 03-06-2005, 08:02 PM

My video/TV-out system is an Athlon 1400 with a Radeon 7000. No chops on anything we play; DVDs work fine, as well as DivX video (even video streaming over the network from the fileserver). Looks like you just need some more umph under the hood.

BTW I'm using the DivX player to play most of the video files, and WinDVD Pro to play DVDs. The remainder of the videos are played by WMP, Winamp (when we need to be able to loop videos at parties and stuff), and of course stupid RealPlayer for the one-off Real files we've got.

skaven · 03-06-2005, 08:05 PM

As a sidenote, you might want to take a brief look at http://www.mythtv.org -- it's an open-source Linux-based TiVo-clone-like-thingy. It also plays DVDs, rips DVDs, transcodes most files into DivX, and has plugins for all kinds of stuff like playing MP3s, weather reports, etc.

As soon as I have the money/time, I'm building me a MythTV box :-D

blizzak · 03-07-2005, 03:18 PM

cool, thx for the info
my current solution was just to switch some parts around, so now I have a athlon 1700 xp with 512 megs of ram and a radeon 7500, and it should work perfectly once I get an s-video to composite converter.

And i'll definitely check out mythtv.....sounds pretty cool

03-06-2005, 12:59 PM	#1 (permalink)
blizzak Crazy	Hardware video playback Hey people. Not sure if I should post there here or in electronics, but here we go. I've got a old celeron 700 with a radeon 7000 in it working as my tv-out box/server. Usually end up putting movies on it (700 meg divx) and watching them perfectly fine, although some of them that have a higher bitrate tend to chop, and fullscreen movies have real trouble. So my question is does anyone know what the best hardware utilizing playback program is? For example, I have a dvd-rom installed and powerdvd 5 on the system, with hardware acceleration turned on. The dvd's still tend to chop sometimes in powerdvd, so I installed the ati dvd player, which i'm told uses the full capabilities of the video card. Sure enough, DVD's worked PERFECTLY when I installed and used it. This leads me to believe that fileplaying software works in a similar fashion; some using a lot of hardware and some using almost purely software decoding. Although I guess it has to do with the codec that the video uses as well...so perhaps only a faster processor would help. Does anyone have any insight as to something that would speed up my computer's video playback? When my friend gets home i'm gonna try the ati file player that he has the cd for; perhaps that would be the best for hardware utilization. Thanks. __________________ Fueled by oxytocin!

03-07-2005, 03:18 PM	#4 (permalink)
blizzak Crazy	cool, thx for the info my current solution was just to switch some parts around, so now I have a athlon 1700 xp with 512 megs of ram and a radeon 7500, and it should work perfectly once I get an s-video to composite converter. And i'll definitely check out mythtv.....sounds pretty cool __________________ Fueled by oxytocin!

03-06-2005, 08:02 PM	#2 (permalink)
skaven Insane Location: Austin, TX	My video/TV-out system is an Athlon 1400 with a Radeon 7000. No chops on anything we play; DVDs work fine, as well as DivX video (even video streaming over the network from the fileserver). Looks like you just need some more umph under the hood. BTW I'm using the DivX player to play most of the video files, and WinDVD Pro to play DVDs. The remainder of the videos are played by WMP, Winamp (when we need to be able to loop videos at parties and stuff), and of course stupid RealPlayer for the one-off Real files we've got.

03-06-2005, 08:05 PM	#3 (permalink)
skaven Insane Location: Austin, TX	As a sidenote, you might want to take a brief look at http://www.mythtv.org -- it's an open-source Linux-based TiVo-clone-like-thingy. It also plays DVDs, rips DVDs, transcodes most files into DivX, and has plugins for all kinds of stuff like playing MP3s, weather reports, etc. As soon as I have the money/time, I'm building me a MythTV box :-D