Bare minimum for 1080p content?

[Glob]

Looking to find out what the bare minimum hardware would be to view 1080p DiVX and Flash video, as far as CPU and on-board graphics go. I'm thinking of building a SFF/HTPC system to do just that.

 

[alyarb]

you will want a dual core atom with the ion chipset. architecturally, that is the minimum.

atom is slow though. you'd be better off with a sargas+785G system which is like $90. also newegg has celeron e3300+G41 motherboards for similarly cheap. it all depends on if you want to decode on the CPU or GPU and if you need ITX or can deal with a larger system.

 

[Aarondeep]

you will want a dual core atom with the ion chipset. architecturally, that is the minimum.

He is right, I have an atom 330 with an ion chipset, but the problem is getting standard media players to play 1080p content. You must use something like media player classic to get it to decode smoothly. For me this was a pain in the a$$. I have the atom PC hooked up to my TV as my media player and it stinks that Windows Media Center wont use the hardware encoder. I know flash is supposed to support GPU encoding, but I could never get it to work with the current beta. To save yourself some headache I would get a dual-core that's faster than an atom PC

 

[Rifter]

you should be looking into a 785G system.

 

[beginner99]

I would also go with a cheap amd or intel that is not meant for nettops.

Atom and flash, that't will also be very problematic.

What will you need it for exactly?
To spare some pain, if you only want to watch downloaded stuff, there are many of these cheap devices to attach to your tv. Takes like 5 min to install, painfree...

 

[Emulex]

ion will suck at full action 1080p. maybe not if you have an x25-m pushing the media . would never expect 3D

 

[Zap]

ion will suck at full action 1080p. maybe not if you have an x25-m pushing the media . would never expect 3D

What would having an SSD do in helping a CPU-bound problem?

 

[poofyhairguy]

ion will suck at full action 1080p.

False, my dual core ION is able to play back the largest Blu Ray x264 rip I have- Avatar (a 42+ GB file)- PERFECTLY using XBMC Live.

In fact looking at the CPU usage while it plays back this file shows that I could probably get by on a single core ION. The trick is not having a full OS like Windows hogging so many resources.

The only things an ION box REALLY can't do is: transcode video (you need a quad for that), or playback HD Flash content.

It certainly can playback 1080p files though....

 

[alyarb]

there are a few brief moments in the "great plains" episode of planet earth (im talking about using uncompressed m2ts files. compressed mkvs may perform a bit better), right after the 'intro to grass" sequence they show the red-billed quelea flying around that have become my 1080p CPU bench. in my overclocking experiences it took a 3.1 GHz conroe, a 3 GHz Rana, and a 3 GHz yorkfield to play that scene correctly with ffdshow. haven't tried anything with dxva because I prefer to CPU-decode, but to be honest there are some great Regor+785G combos right now and that's what I would do. you can underclock/undervolt and use the radeon or you can use the CPU.

really the minimum power required to play 1080p kind of depends on what your TDP requirements and volume requirements are, and exactly what quality of "1080p" you are trying to decode. You can do it with ION, you can do it with 785G, or x86. You can do it in ITX or mATX, and I think mATX is best because it's much cheaper and more expandable. There is a 2.9 GHz regor + giggabyte 785G board for $120 at newegg right now.

 

[master7045]

Would a Celeron 430 and a ZOTAC GF9300-G-E work for 1080p video? That should be fairly low power as the CPU is 35W TDP. If the 430 doesn't cut it, I'm pretty positive an E3300 would do just fine. All you have to do now is find some cheap DDR2 RAM and a 2.5" hard drive and your set.

 

[Emulex]

whoa wait we said 1080p not blu-ray. there are many other codecs out there. imo you need to support all codecs "avatar". including theora divx flash.

iirc the celereon dual core series (e1500) clocked up to 3ghz would soft decode 1080p all day long or a p5200 or e6750(standard clock).

celeron single core 430 would need to probably be up over 4ghz to handle all codecs - since no video card currently accelerates ALL codecs that are seen 1080p.

 

[Throckmorton]

Guys... I think you're way off with this dual core atom stuff.

I have a Sony CW with 2.1ghz Core 2 Duo. I had it set to limit the processors to 50% clock when on battery power.... Until it had trouble decoding 720p Parks and Recreation episodes. I had to turn off the clockspeed limit. How is an Atom going to decode 720p much less 1080p?

 

[Hacp]

Guys... I think you're way off with this dual core atom stuff.

I have a Sony CW with 2.1ghz Core 2 Duo. I had it set to limit the processors to 50% clock when on battery power.... Until it had trouble decoding 720p Parks and Recreation episodes. I had to turn off the clockspeed limit. How is an Atom going to decode 720p much less 1080p?

Well dual core atoms have gma950 I think so they'll have hardware acceleration. The non-dual core ones are stuck with x3100 I think, which doesn't hardware accelerate h264.

 

[Throckmorton]

Well dual core atoms have gma950 I think so they'll have hardware acceleration. The non-dual core ones are stuck with x3100 I think, which doesn't hardware accelerate h264.

Well wouldn't my GT 230M accelerate decoding too?

 

[alyarb]

if you had to raise your CPU clock speed in order to decode that 720p movie, then you are not using the GT 230M. Your GPU is capable of decoding, but you haven't installed any dxva decoders/players for h264.

 

[Emulex]

which player handles all formats @ 1080p using GT230m acceleration? all- not just blu-ray or h.264

 

[alyarb]

your best bet is something like the cccp or k-lite codec packs. they can use windows media player or media center or media player classic-home cinema and will ask you to enable DXVA upon installation. this means h.264 and VC1. nobody ever made a dxva decoder for divx 3.11a so you're out of luck. thats why you install codec packs, so something like ffdshow can use the CPU for stuff like this. the vast majority of 1080p video is h.264, with VC-1 and MPEG2 picking up the remainder, so dxva has you covered. Just find a popular codec pack that is updated often and stick with it. here's a list of DXVA-capable media players

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DXVA#Software_support

 

[Emulex]

cool so you just load that up in osx or linux?

 

[poofyhairguy]

cool so you just load that up in osx or linux?

No. For OSX the best program for hardware acceleration is a version of Plex:

http://elan.plexapp.com/2010/04/27/hardware-accelerated-h-264-decoding-on-plex/

For Linux once you make sure VDPAU is working, XBMC rocks. Heck XBMC Live rocks!