Will P3-500 decode AVC?

[junglemike]

Hello. I made some 10 clips of my sister's newborn. I want to send them to father by email.It is 3-min clips because this is what canon A70 camere can do. Camera makes them in mjpeg format at around 5000kbps. Since my father has dial-up internet, I have to to compress them to send. I've managed to make encode those clips so that one 3-min clip will fit in one email (~10mb, including header) This lives me with something like ~350kbps video bitrate. First I tried xvid, but it introduced huge artifacts, than i tried h264@slower profile, and quality is more or less OK. Video resolution is 464x352.
My father has PIII-500mhz computer. The question is will he be able to watch those clips w/o dropped frames? How can I know this?
Thanks.

[unmei]

I would say it is about at the borderline.
I have a p3-600 with which i can watch 640x480 (~600-1000kbit/s) h.264 made with x264 just fine when i use coreAVC. But as soon as there are soft subtitles or bitrate above maybe 1300kbit/s or maybe also some settings (i suspect many bframes maybe) it is too much for that computer. Also with using FFDShow for decoding it has been too slow in the past (i heard it got a bit faster decoding lately but since i am happy with coreAVC i haven't used FFDShow for h.264 in some time).

Now your computer in question is a bit slower, but you als have a lot less bitrate (->less of the demanding CABAC decoding) and only little more than half the pixels per frame. So i would say with coreAVC he is definitly on the safe side (unless he has some background processes hogging half his CPU). With FFDShow i can't say.. it may well be possible - i *guess* it should work...

But then again i've heard of people who have like 2.4GHz computers and can't get 640x480 h.264 decoded fast enough (i really don't want to know how messed up such a system must be =)).

[check]

I would encode to baseline profile only and use CAVLC and tell him to purchase coreAVC if you intend to try this.
An alternative would be to mail him a single CD...

[Blue_MiSfit]

Roger that. Mail him a CD with XviD video and a copy of VLC :)

That's really the way to go.

[Sirber]

I recall MPC + CoreAVC the fastest way...