Abit's old BP6 play xvid?

[jakfr02]

Is anyone out there using Abit's old BP6 motherboard and playing xvid/divx movies in full screen mode?

What your spec?
What player are you using?

[lithoc]

I'm using

Abit BH6(i440BX chipset)
P3 Coppermine 733MHz
256MB PC133 RAM.
Geforce4 Ti4200 8X AGP but run at 2X(coz BX chipset only support 2X)

No problem playback at fullscreen.
CPU usage is around ~70%

I'm using XVID decoder. If you need faster decoder, I would suggest you take a look at ffdshow ;)

I tried playback 640x272 XVID with Pentium-MMX 233Mhz with VESA 2.0 VGA card + 32MB PC100 SDRAM.
Using optimized Linux + MPlayer I able to playback too but you'll get few frames lagging during fast scene but will catch up as the slow scene begin.

[Ark]

A motherboard has nothing to do with the possibility (or not) to view some kind of video, it mainly depends on cpu/memory (graphic card too) speed and on installed software (players/decoders).

(I hope to have catched your point..)

[jakfr02]

I should clarify the question a bit.

Is anyone using an unmodified BP6 board to play these movies. Those with BP6 mobo know the maximum unmodified processors you can use are celeron 550. I think memory is limited to 768mg.

I'm willing to beef up processors, memory, etc if I know it will work. But I don't want to go through hassle if it not going to work.

[Ark]

Originally posted by jakfr02
I should clarify the question a bit.

Is anyone using an unmodified BP6 board to play these movies. Those with BP6 mobo know the maximum unmodified processors you can use are celeron 550. I think memory is limited to 768mg.

I'm willing to beef up processors, memory, etc if I know it will work. But I don't want to go through hassle if it not going to work.

Well, that's more complicated...

I haven't one of this, but i guess you're forced to use the fastest players/decoders you can use.
I suggest you the combo ffdshow/mplayer...
Though i can't assure you on the results you want...

[Joe Fenton]

You're in luck. I have an ABit BP6 with dual Celeron 550MHz CPUs and 256M of memory running Windows XP Pro. I use BSPlayer and XviD on an ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder (7000) video card. It plays everything I've thrown at it full screen just fine. I don't know that it will handle HD video, but it has no trouble with non-HD material.

It's a nice system... I got it so I could play around with multi-processing. I got mine off eBay for $106. :D

[jakfr02]

Joe, you're the man.

Are you using the mobo hard drive controller or something else like promise, etc. I haven't heard of many people getting the HPT366 controller to work under WinXP. Right now I'm using the ATA/33 controller and think it may be part of the problem. I'll try BSPlayer and see if it makes any difference. Then I try getting the 550 celerons.

Ark, I tried the combo ffdshow/mplayer but it runs fine for a few seconds then paused then skipped. That is, run, pause, run, pause, run pause... The processor load if maxed except during the pause, i think. I can't really tell because the mplayer runs in full screen mode.

Could it be my video card: GeForce4 MX440 w/ 128mb?

[jakfr02]

Correction, max processors for an unmodified BP6 is Celeron 533, sspec# SL3PZ, pkg type PPGA.

Joe, are your processors celerons 533? If 550, you could possibly be running 366 overclocked at 550? Or possible you have a different motherboard. Abit's VP6 is a dual board with FC-PGA sockets that supports 550 PIIIs not celerons. I sure would appreciate it if you could confirm what you have.

[Joe Fenton]

Originally posted by jakfr02
Correction, max processors for an unmodified BP6 is Celeron 533, sspec# SL3PZ, pkg type PPGA.

Joe, are your processors celerons 533? If 550, you could possibly be running 366 overclocked at 550? Or possible you have a different motherboard. Abit's VP6 is a dual board with FC-PGA sockets that supports 550 PIIIs not celerons. I sure would appreciate it if you could confirm what you have.

Right you are... I almost forgot that. They are Celeron 533s, but they are overclocked just a smidge to 550MHz. I could step them down half a multiplier, but I've never seen any trouble at 550MHz. I just thought is was better running them at 550 instead of 500... overclock them 17MHz instead of underclocking them 33MHz. :D

As to your other question, I've got it flashed with the latest BIOS, but I'm just using the normal IDE controller and a 5400 RPM drive at the moment. You can find the latest info and BIOSs and other stuff at:
http://www.bp6.com/

It seems to be down at the moment though.

The lowest I've gone on systems for playing videos is an old 400MHz PII with a Permedia 2 video card. It would play 640x480 xvid encodes just fine in BSPlayer, but if the action got too intense (like Cowboy Bebop hyperspace scenes) it would skip frames a bit.

EDIT: I ran CPUInfo on it and got the report.

Processor : Intel Celeron (Mendocino)
Current Core Speed : 551 MHz
Current System Clock : 100.18 MHz
Multiplyer : 5.5x
Core Speed : 363 MHz
System Clock : 66 MHz
Front Side Bus : FSB66
Revision : B0
Socket : Socket 370

I played my two-CD rip of Akira... no problems. No skipping at all under BSPlayer. If I remember correctly, this rip has an average bitrate of about 1100kbps with the max set to 4000kbps. Also, because it has the second Celeron, the system was nice and responsive without affecting BSPlayer. That's the nice thing about SMP systems - even if a program is maxing out one CPU, the system can use the other and everything still feels nice and responsive.

If you need any other info let me know.

[jakfr02]

Thanks you for all your help. You gave me the confidense to find the solution. www.bp6.com is a great site I've used it until it went down. I hope it just temporary.

The answer to my delima is setting the AGPClock to 1/1 in Softmenu. I has something to do with the AGP running at 1x verse 2x. Here is the site that gave me the answer.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.abit/msg/243b76b4b1de2dee?dmode=source

By the way my cpu utilization while playing a movie was like 30%.

[Joe Fenton]

Depending on the video card and encoding, you could be using the card to help decode the video. Even if you aren't, most divx/xvid encodes shouldn't take too much CPU unless you're on a PII.

I should have thought about the AGP setting - I'm a regular on the nVidia forum and most people reporting similar trouble in linux usually have the system set to run with the AGP off or at a lower value. You want your AGP going as fast as possible so that transferring video data is a minor part of the time spent on playing a video.

I hope the BP6 site being down is temporary as well. It's a good site for BP6 owners.

[jakfr02]

No need to change any of the bios settings. A little utility call ReClock Directshow Filter solved the problem. I installed ReClock ran a video, then uninstalled it.

Problem solved. :)

[tmpy222]

Hi,
As I found out, you need to have both xvid and ffdshow installed to play xvid clips smoothly on low end P3 systems (~500mhz). If only xvid is installed, the clips would stutter or get jumpy... If only ffdshow is installed, it can't play higher resolution xvid clips (700X300+). It would play then pause for a few seconds then play... CPU usage is 100%.
What I can't figure out is that you need to install xvid codec so that ffdshow would play higher resolution clips smoothly. Does ffdshow use part of xvid when xvid codec is present? I tried to switch the codec in ffdshow configuration to xvid. And it started to stutter. Switching back to libavcodec would play things smoothly again...
Also with only xvid installed, the cpu usage is 70-80% playing a 640x288 clip on a ~500mhz P3. But it still stutters... strange...
With both xvid and ffdshow installed, everything plays smoothly (from 640x272 to 720x480) with cpu usage of 50%-90% depending on the clip.
I tried xvid 1.0 to 1.1beta1. Same thing.
ffdshow is 10/12/2004 sse version.
It's a win2000 system.