How much does a Video Card help with Netflix streaming

[2canSAM]

I have an old IBM Netvista SFF PC that is not being used. I have toyed around with setting this up as a DVD player and Netflix/Pandora/Youtube Streaming box for an extra Standard Def TV in the house. Right now all it has is integrated Intel 845GV Graphics and playing back Netflix on a 15" LCD has not been real great. Would adding a better video card help in that area? The system specs are listed in the link below. Thanks

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-44527.html

 

[blanketyblank]

Looking at your PSU I'm going to say no. 200 watts isn't much power for a gpu now a days and P4s were pretty power hungry if I remember correctly. Also old PSUs are less likely to provide sufficient 12V power. You probably don't have a pci express x 8+ slot in that system anyways, and AGP cards are pricy so not a recommended upgrade.
In general though with the right software (beta) new video cards can help accelerate flash video so netflix streaming should be better.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I don't think that it would be worth it. Get a 785G board, and an Athlon II X2 chip, and go to town.

 

[Modular]

I don't know how much this will help, but here's my .02

I have an AMD Athlon 64 paired with an MSI Neo4 Platinum motherboard and a 6600 (vanilla: non-gt) as the base of my HTPC. I'm using Windows 7 64-bit and run Netflix both through the media center as well as through firefox. I'm not sure how much my video card is actually helping since it's old and underpowered, but the CPU is generally at about 50-70% usage while watching Netflix movies. I don't know how much the GPU is being used as this model doesn't allow that type of monitoring, but I can tell you that I monitor the GPU temperature via Rivatuner, and it doesn't go up much (if at all) while watching videos, so I doubt it's being used.

Long story short; a cpu upgrade will probably yield you the best results.

 

[jtvang125]

http://blog.netflix.com/2008/11/encoding-for-streaming.html

From the link it looks like they're using an old version of WMV and the newer VC1 for second generation encodes and HD material. Don't quote me on this but I don't think any GPUs at the moment support hardware acceleration for these codecs. Even if they do it's still dependent on whether the player supports HA.

After looking at the specs looks like it only has 2 pci slots. I'm pretty sure there are no PCI video cards that supports HA. So your only route is finding the fastest P4 CPU that would fit in the socket if you don't want to do a full upgrade.

 

[Fox5]

There are $100 refurbished computers on tigerdirect that will play it better.
Alternatively, get a nettop, which run for $100 to $400.

 

[DaveSimmons]

The Atom based nettops with intel graphics aren't good for software-based decoding of HD material, and it sounds like Ion (nVidia graphics for Atom) won't help with Netflix.

 

[Modelworks]

Netflix uses silverlight for video . Version 3 of silverlight , the current version, uses gpu acceleration if the card supports it.

Live and on-demand true HD (720p+) Smooth Streaming. IIS Media Services (formerly IIS Media Pack), an integrated HTTP media delivery platform, features Smooth Streaming which dynamically detects and seamlessly switches, in real time, the video quality of a media file delivered to Silverlight based on local bandwidth and CPU conditions.
More format choice. In addition to native support for VC-1/WMA, Silverlight 3 now offers users native support for MPEG-4-based H.264/AAC Audio, enabling content distributors to deliver high-quality content to a wide variety of computers and devices.
True HD playback in full-screen. Leveraging graphics processor unit (GPU) hardware acceleration, Silverlight experiences can now be delivered in true full-screen HD (720p+).
Extensible media format support. With the new Raw AV pipeline, Silverlight can easily support a wide variety of third-party codecs. Audio and video can be decoded outside the runtime and rendered in Silverlight, extending format support beyond the native codecs.
Industry leading content protection. Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady Content Protection enables protected in-browser experiences using AES encryption or Windows Media DRM.

 

[DaveSimmons]

> Leveraging graphics processor unit (GPU) hardware acceleration, Silverlight experiences can now be delivered in true full-screen HD (720p+).

If that's true for existing HD content (not just newer encoding) then the Acer Aspire Revo nettop with Ion ($200 at Newegg) would be a good choice. The Ion will also help with Flash 10.x HD video.

 

[s44]

Wait, Netflix lets PCs do HD now?

 

[tweakboy]

So long as its a geforce 5xxx series and higher, or

ATI equivlant.

 

[s44]

No, I don't mean as a hardware issue. As of December, PCs could only get 480p streams from Netflix, not any 720p ones (only dedicated devices -- consoles, Tivo, Blu-Ray players -- get the latter). I don't recall seeing any news about this changing.

 

[daveybrat]

Adding a discrete card would help playback, but not in your case. You do not have an AGP slot, and a PCI video card would be too bandwidth limited to help.

I had a customer's AthlonXP 2200+ that was very choppy on Netflix with onboard video. Installed a new Nvidia 6200 256MB AGP card and it smoothed it out fine.

 

[Fox5]

So long as its a geforce 5xxx series and higher, or

ATI equivlant.

Geforce FX cards could only do mpeg1 and 2. Geforce 6 could partially accelerate vc-1 and h.264. I'd imagine most content will be limited like flash's gpu acceleration is, geforce 8 and above, and radeon 4000 and above.