XviD on a Celeron 400?

[crOOk]

Hi!
My grandfather is running a Celeron 400 and wants me to digitalize his collection of home videos. Now, before I 'm gonna get me a VCR and a PCI card with a video-in, I'd like to to what extent he'll be able to play MPEG-4 files.
I'd really like to use XviD bacause I'm already very familiar with it and have done hundreds of encodes to XviD. If there is another codec which uses less processing power, I'd probably only use it instead if the benefit is huge.

So if you own a Celeron 400, which resolutions can still be played back, are B-frames allowed (QPel certainly aren't) and so on...
I'd really appreciate some feedback.

crOOk

[crOOk]

Uuups, maybe I should have read the thread just below...


originally posted by Koepi
bframes, qpel and gmc increase the processor and memory usage by a good amount. Avoid them for slow devices playback.
But there's still some open questions regarding the resolution etc.

[mrlipring]

well, the resolution doesn't have to be particularly high for vhs captures.

i'd get some samples of divx at different resolutions and bitrates, and try them on his pc, and see what's the max it likes.

this will depend also on postprocessing and what player he uses.

i can't see a c400 liking very high bitrate/resolution xvid though.

[Koepi]

I'd use a resolution about 320x240 (NTSC) or 352x288 (PAL) - you could use VCD for that, this is even viewable on an old pentium233 :)

Regards
Koepi

[Lobuz]

At my old pentum200mmx Divx at 640x272 25fps no sound plays flawlessly with ffdshow without postprocessing and rescaling at oryginal 640x480. To play movie with sound I must first decode mp3 to mono wav at 32KHz and remux(stereo wav is too much - slow HDD?).

Regards
Lobuz

[Enigmax]

The reproducer Crystal Player with codec of Digital Nero can work with little power. I have managed to perfectly see videos in a Pentium II 300. You will be able to obtain Nero Decoder here:
http://adminenigmax.proboards19.com/index.cgi?board=mpeg4&action=display&num=1066908715

Greetings

[galocza]

few years ago my friend had a 400cel and i a 433cel. in those times we both were able to play divx movies (3.11 ;) mind you 8).
the only way is testing: i'd first try xvid without the options that burden the processor according to Koepi. if that fails, id go for divx 4.12. i know that my friend could playback rips made with this, at higher resolutions than quartered pal/ntsc. if all else fails, you can try mpeg1 (vcd), bit i dont like it because its quite big and ugly 8). i think however that a video resized to the quarter of its original should play smoothly with newer codecs but maybe not with all the extra options enabled.
good experimenting 8).

[ChronoReverse]

Stick with the simple profile (i.e. no qpel and bframes). And stay below 640x480.

As long as the person is using ffdshow in conjunction with a good player (mplayer2 (aka WMP6.4), zoomplayer, maybe bsplayer) then it'll play on a celeron 400.

How do I know? I own a Celeron 366 ;)


Oh yeah, and turn off the post-processing on the playback computer.

[Neo Neko]

Boot your PC with Movix. ;) http://sourceforge.net/projects/movix/

[bilu]

@NeoNeko

Good point. A smaller OS, since it's a light distro booting from CD, would consume less CPU cycles.


Bilu

[Sharktooth]

Try also Geexbox (http://www.geexbox.org/en/) :)

[ChronoReverse]

Am I the only one to think that telling your grandfather to restart his computer to watch a video to not be a viable solution?

I mean, _I'm_ willing to do that, but I think that other more normal people might not appreciate it as much.

[bilu]

With Geexbox your grandfather PC would become some sort of VCR :)


Bilu

[Neo Neko]

Originally posted by bilu
With Geexbox your grandfather PC would become some sort of VCR :)


Bilu

Same with Movix. You can make movix so that all they have to do it turn the computer on insert the cd and watch the movie. It is not at all that hard. It is about the easiest thing to do on a PC.

Thanks for the Geexbox link though Sharktooth. I had never seen it before.

[communist]

GeexBox rox - its pretty good - and only 4mb so you can fit it on your rips.

[LigH]

Not Celeron, but AMD K6/2-400, 3Dfx Banshee: 512x288 plays fine, but fullscreen to 1024x768 is not so smooth anymore (using Win2K, MPC and ffdshow with automatic postprocessing; Nic's XviD filter might or might not be a bit faster?).

[dimzon]

1) Use FFDShow to decode
2) Use Crystal Player to play
3) Setup your mp3 decoder to use less resourses

[crOOk]

Hi everyone!
I'm overwhelmed by the huge response you gave me. I feared not to have any responses at all (besides the usual XviD forum posts like: Go figure it out yourself, it's easy!).
The actual problem about doing exactly that - figuring it out myself - is my grandfather's PC which is hundreds of miles away from me...
I think what I'll do is send him two CDs with lots of test clips on it, one CD using Movix, the other one using GeexBox.
Thank you all for your advice, you've been a great help!

[Perplx]

The most efficient media player I've used is VLC (http://www.videolan.org/ ) on my p4 2.4@3.0 it uses 0-4% CPU mainly hovering at 1% ,decoding an xvid movie 608x256 866kbit.

[Bandung]

I would treat the encode in the same fashion as if you were encoding for a Pocket PC with the XScale processor.

1) Screen resolution: 320 x 240 (or 320 x 176 - 320 x 144) the latter two are to maintain the original source's aspect ratio.
2) bit rates 250 - 400 kbps. If you use 320 x 144 then you can almost double your bit rate to 500 - 800 kbps
3) simple profile - no b frames, you name it.
4) mono audio mp3 - cbr rather than vbr.
5) either 64 kbps or 32 kbps @ 22,050 Hz sampling rate (mono)
5) if you can, stick with 24 or 30 fps depending upon your source (ie DVD use 24, tv use 30). Otherwise decimate your frame rate by 2. (don't change your frame rate, use decimation. Otherwise you will introduce audio/video synchronization problems. If you do decide to decimate your frame rate to 15, then you can up your bit rate a bit more.
6) crop the edges of your frames and use the appropriate filters. (you should aim for a more "smoothing" look rather than sharp edges. always best to do compression testing.

I think Koepi's suggestion of using the VCD format is also a good one. If you aren't up to experimenting with Xvid at these low bit rates, then VCD is your man.

[Joe Fenton]

Don't use ffdshow on slow computers. DivX is much faster on slow machines. My dad has a 350 MHz PII system with PC100 memory and an old PCI Voodoo2 card. Using DivX, I could play a 640x480 24FPS 1200Kbps encode with b-frames. ffdshow choked badly on it. Also, bsplayer is a very good player for Windows systems. It tends to use little processor time compared to others.

It's not surprising that people recommending you use 320x240 at 500 Kbps encodes are running ffdshow... it's just that slow on old machines.

[Neo Neko]

Originally posted by Joe Fenton
Don't use ffdshow on slow computers. DivX is much faster on slow machines.

Odd you should mention that. The most recent releases of Divx and it's decoders are on par with ffdshow performance wise. But they don't beat it in any testing I have seen so far. How do you have ffdshow configured. I suspect that it is misconfigured rather than Divx outperforming it in any noticable way.

Originally posted by Joe Fenton
Also, bsplayer is a very good player for Windows systems. It tends to use little processor time compared to others.

Not really. Media Player Classic, Zoom Player, and several others are just as good and CPU friendly.

Originally posted by Joe Fenton
It's not surprising that people recommending you use 320x240 at 500 Kbps encodes are running ffdshow... it's just that slow on old machines.

Ffdshow is not slow on old machines. Do you have any solid testing to show this? I have my doubts. Again what settings are you using for Divx and ffdshow respectively.

[dimzon]

Originally posted by crOOk
The actual problem about doing exactly that - figuring it out myself - is my grandfather's PC which is hundreds of miles away from me...
I think what I'll do is send him two CDs with lots of test clips on it, one CD using Movix, the other one using GeexBox.

Hi, I have such problem right now (slow PC far away from me) and I ask you to publish result of your experiment :)

[Mario Bros]

Hi everyone! I also own a celeron 333mhz and i got the best results with divx5.05. It's prety fast,but how can i force divx5.05 to decode xvid movies too. Since 5.05 doesnt have mpeg4 decode option, and i dont want to modify the files FourCC.
I also have problems displaying subtitles, since most players support it trough VMR9 (DirectX 9), and my video card/driver does not support it.
Any ideas?

[iago]

Mario Bros,

For subtitles, use BSPlayer, with the same name as the movie file. It's also the fastest player, most suitable for slow machines.

[Mario Bros]

Iago:
As I mentioned above subtitles work only in VMR9 mode, my v.card does not support it. If you know such player that can display subtitles without VMR7/9 please let me know.

[m99]

BSPlayer don't need VMR9-mode to display subtitles.