How would a 900Mhz Dothan (Pentium M derivative) with 512MB Ram handle AVC decoding?

[Chainmax]

Sometime next year, I might be buying an Asus Eee as a portable music/video player and was wondering how fit it would be to decode a 480p x264 encode made with all the options turned on (AE-Maxquality profile mostly) and 5.1 AAC sound. Would it do all right with ffdshow (or whatever equivalent it has in Linux) or would it need CoreAVC for smooth playback?

[akupenguin]

Should be enough. I'd estimate 30% cpu for 480p 24fps, 6% cpu for 5.1 AAC, plus a little dshow overhead if you're not using mplayer.

[Atak_Snajpera]

900Mhz should be enough. I made simple test on my Acer Laptop Turion 1800Mhz. 640x480 29.97fps 2Mbps HQ-Slower equivalent + HQRGB32 and task manager showed no more than 50% for MPC.

[Sagekilla]

That should be fine, my system (A Opteron 170 @ 2 GHz) plays back extremely high settings with < 25%ish CPU usage. Unless I go with 720p video I never have dropped frames (Which, even with 720p video it's very infrequent.)

[Chainmax]

That's good to hear, thanks for the quick answers :).

[CruNcher]

900 mhz no problem for 720p H.264 if correctly tuned (bitrate not to high) im testing this the whole time on my laptop (800 mhz Singlecore Mobile Sempron) in energy save mode and it works quiet well :) with other implementations it might be even possible to save more energy @ decoding. (test ongoing) sooner or later i will have 4 (Mainconcept,X264,Ateme,VC-1) final compares of 3h movie (1080p 3 Mbit DVD5) that im also gonna run on the laptop to see how complex they are so if the Visual Quality is the same for all the decoding complexity is gonna decide the winner (same complexity is being tried to achive with the settings of course for VC-1 the encoding time is used) ;) ( i wan't real results of the encoded file complexity so benchmarking is one way but looking when the batteries run out of power i think a more reliable ;) ) also im gonna test different audio and video decoders aswell as renderer and parser ;) (the encoding time also needs to be higher then the MSU test min 4 fps on Singlecore 2.4 Ghz)

[Blue_MiSfit]

That's insane CruNcher :)

I don't know how you have things tweaked, but my 1 GHz P3 box had problems with higher bitrate 480p.

~MiSfit

[foxyshadis]

My old 1.3 P-M Banias laptop, which is about equivalent to a 1.2 Dothan, would start to stutter at 24p when peak bitrate went to around 3Mbit. But that was with an old version of lavc decoder, things might be much better with newer ones or CoreAVC.

[Chainmax]

It's too bad that the Eee doesn't have the GMA X3100 graphics chipset which has VC-1 acceleration on it though, that might have had made it possible to watch 720p VC1 videos on it.

[((( atom )))]

Wel, I have major speed-issues with 720p content on a 2.4 ghz duron running mplayer under linux. I use crf 18 and almost all goodies for encoding and my player box refuses to play all of them. If anyone has any hints on this one, I'd be very glad.

[RaynQuist]

My sister reports stuttering with 720p24 ~1mbps on 2.4GHz Northwood and FX5200 with CCCP

[Chainmax]

Never mind, at 259 bucks for 256MB Ram and only 2GB internal storage, I might as well just buy a used PSP or a Dell Vostro. That's a damn shame :(.

[legoman666]

why are you going to bother with 5.1 AAC on a tiny laptop with stereo speakers?

[foxyshadis]

Tiny laptop -> 1/8" or optical out -> massively overpowered home theater on its own breaker -> visit from the boys in blue, if my cousin's anything to go by. =D For when you're home anyway.

Good luck on a good laptop, if you hang around ebay enough the deals pop up, especially with the number of new students dumping old (and new!) systems on ebay in the next few months.

[Razorholt]

@CruNcher: I hope you're going to share your tweakings because like the others, my 2.1Ghz Dell Dimension can't handle 720p...

Also, I'd like to build a linux box - Fedora Core - to play HD content (among other things of course). Does anybody know what the minimum CPU / RAM I'll have to put in there?

Thanks.
- Dan

[nm]

Also, I'd like to build a linux box - Fedora Core - to play HD content (among other things of course). Does anybody know what the minimum CPU / RAM I'll have to put in there?
About the same as with Windows (except that there is no hardware H.264 decoding support, yet). If you use CoreAVC with MPlayer or Xine, most dualcore CPU's should work fine. Otherwise you'll probably need a very fast singlecore or dualcore. You may also be able to squeeze a few more percents of performance by using a 64-bit distribution and by compiling the latest MPlayer from SVN yourself.

1 GB of RAM is more than enough for HD video playback and normal desktop use.

[Razorholt]

Thanks nm. I'd like to use to use Mplayer and a single core. Does it mean that I need a 3Ghz? Regarding coreAVC I believe it is not free anymore, correct?

[nm]

Thanks nm. I'd like to use to use Mplayer and a single core. Does it mean that I need a 3Ghz? Regarding coreAVC I believe it is not free anymore, correct?
Yes, you'd need to buy CoreAVC and I'm not sure if the latest versions can be used by patching MPlayer (http://code.google.com/p/coreavc-for-linux/). CoreAVC 1.3 does work.

If you want to play high-bitrate 720p or 1080i/p H.264, you'll need the fastest single core CPU that you can afford. On the other hand, I can play low-bitrate 720p30 easily on an Athlon XP 2400+ with libavcodec. It depends on the video, so YMMV.

[akupenguin]

core2 2.4GHz, 64bit mplayer, single threaded: can reliably play 1080p24 15mbit, but stutters when peak bitrate gets up around 25mbit.

[DeathTheSheep]

Just to put things in perspective, at 200mhz my Pocket PC (2004) plays QVGA main profile at 300kbps with AAC-LC audio without much stuttering at all. At 400mhz, it breezes through any QVGA you can throw at it, and at 728...who knows what this baby could do with VGA out.

Then again, it runs CoreAVC, so... :)