A few HTPC questions - hard drive? remote?

Quote from cardboardbox : just wanted to quote you guys so you'd get the little notification thing. I finally put together my htpc, got xbmc up and running by using the openELEC installer and played a 1080p mkv. Unfortunately the video stutters/pauses very briefly every 10 second or so. Is this expected since I'm using the on cpu video?

If you're using CPU, then it's expected. However, you may be able to (by playing with settings) put the video load on the GPU. Then it should run smoothly.

Quote from bonkman : If you're using CPU, then it's expected. However, you may be able to (by playing with settings) put the video load on the GPU. Then it should run smoothly.

I'll take a look for that setting this evening, thanks. If I cant find anything, I might pick up a cheap Radeon 5450 and be done with it.

Quote from cardboardbox : just wanted to quote you guys so you'd get the little notification thing. I finally put together my htpc, got xbmc up and running by using the openELEC installer and played a 1080p mkv. Unfortunately the video stutters/pauses very briefly every 10 second or so. Is this expected since I'm using the on cpu video?

Quote from bonkman : If you're using CPU, then it's expected. However, you may be able to (by playing with settings) put the video load on the GPU. Then it should run smoothly.

I was JUST considering making an HTPC using a sandy bridge celeron and skipping a vid card in hopes of being able to use a smaller case. can the sandy bridge graphics not handle 1080p well? I know people dog it for games but I thought it could at least stream high def files and/or blu-ray playback.

Quote from cardboardbox : I'll take a look for that setting this evening, thanks. If I cant find anything, I might pick up a cheap Radeon 5450 and be done with it.

5450 if you're in a rush but if you find a 6450 for $20 or less that might be a better card. I know it has double the stream processors but I don't even know if that helps for HTPC haha.

Quote from RUsum1 : I was JUST considering making an HTPC using a sandy bridge celeron and skipping a vid card in hopes of being able to use a smaller case. can the sandy bridge graphics not handle 1080p well? I know people dog it for games but I thought it could at least stream high def files and/or blu-ray playback. 5450 if you're in a rush but if you find a 6450 for $20 or less that might be a better card. I know it has double the stream processors but I don't even know if that helps for HTPC haha.

Considering the Zino HD 400 has HD 3200 graphics and can play most HD files fine if it's GPU accelerated, you should be ok. However, I don't have personal experience with the sandy bridge processors so you may want to check online reviews or benchmarks.

and 5450 is more than enough. 4350 is enough but can't do HD audio. 6450 is technically overkill but if it's cheap then who cares? However, I've found it easier to find fanless GPUs on sale for the 5450.

Quote from cardboardbox : I'll take a look for that setting this evening, thanks. If I cant find anything, I might pick up a cheap Radeon 5450 and be done with it.

you still will run into the same problem if you're not enabling your GPU in the software. I wish I could help you more but I'm unfamiliar with XBMC.

This link may help: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?ti...or_Windows. Here's another: http://mymediaexperience.com/now-...ia-center/

I have a 4 yr old E1200 celeron (LGA775, 1.6Ghz, 800Mhz 65nm) on a ECS G33T-M2 board (G33 chip, GMA3100 integrated vga) and it plays 1080p x264 videos fine with VLC and without proprietary codec/engine. It's highly doubtful that the CPU/GPU is the bottleneck here.

The resource monitor from task manager might show which component the playback bottleneck is. Was the video streamed (network bottleneck?) or played from the local drive (uncompressed bluray or compressed video?)?

passmark score (the higher the better)
E1200 - 896
G530 - 2277

Quote from bonkman : you still will run into the same problem if you're not enabling your GPU in the software. I wish I could help you more but I'm unfamiliar with XBMC. This link may help: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?ti...or_Windows. Here's another: http://mymediaexperience.com/now-...ia-center/

your second link provides this info:

"Note: if you are using Intel Core-i3, make sure that you have enabled VAAPI (Video Acceleration API) hardware acceleration in the XBMC system settings to utilize Intel hardware-accelerated media decoding on Linux."

I have VAAPI turned on already so I guess I've done what I can do already. I'll try XBMC on Windows 7 at some point soon.

Quote from teetee1 : I have a 4 yr old E1200 celeron (LGA775, 1.6Ghz, 800Mhz 65nm) on a ECS G33T-M2 board (G33 chip, GMA3100 integrated vga) and it plays 1080p x264 videos fine with VLC and without proprietary codec/engine. It's highly doubtful that the CPU/GPU is the bottleneck here. The resource monitor from task manager might show which component the playback bottleneck is. Was the video streamed (network bottleneck?) or played from the local drive (uncompressed bluray or compressed video?)? passmark score (the higher the better) E1200 - 896 G530 - 2277

heh, yes if that setup can play 1080p smoothly, I definitely should have no problem. Maybe it was a weird mkv file. I'll try a different one tonight.

I'm running XBMC on Linux and I really dont know much about Linux to find a task manager. I used openELEC to automatically set everything up. The video was a local compressed video.