HTPC minimum specs

[poofyhairguy]

i personally think the floor would be the 7750. that card seriously uses very low power and can play everything.

Yeah that is a great HTPC card.

 

[piasabird]

I have never said "I wish I had purchased a cheaper more gutless CPU!"

Building a computer with the minimum specs is not such a good idea. I expect a computer to last at least 3 years maybe as long as 5-10 years.

This is my opinion.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

^^ Yes, overprovisioning is always preferable to penny-pinching!

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

I think it's something along these lines.

I tried playing a Youtube video at 1080 resolution on the J1900 and it played fine, no choppiness or anything.

I then tried watching an episode of Gotham from Hulu and it was choppy.

I'm guessing something in the codecs used between those two sites? DRM?

I don't suppose there's any way to tweak the plugins to function better with Hulu and these other sites?

I wouldn't use Hulu as a gauge for anything. I think some of their encodes at least for PC streaming are flat out broken. I've had episodes in the same series go from smooth as butter to a choppy mess one from the next with not a thing to fix it.

 

[evotz]

If the display is set to a lower resolution when you go full screen does it stutter less?

Sorry for the late response.

720 resolution seems to show the same stuttering.

I've dome some experimenting with this. I got a Chromebook, and Acer C720, it seems to do much better at streaming even in 1080 resolution.

I also tried booting the J1900 with an Ubuntu Live USB drive (surprisingly that worked, despite the computer being Windows locked) and I think streaming was better on it in Linux than in Windows. Although the C720 might've performed better. The Ubuntu Live USB drive is only 1GB, so it doesn't have a lot of temporary space to work with, which might be some of the problems.

I'm thinking the issue is something within Windows, something running in the background that's taking up processor space. I'm thinking about trying to bypass the Windows boot lock and install a full blown Linux OS on there and see if that helps.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Sorry for the late response.

720 resolution seems to show the same stuttering.

I've dome some experimenting with this. I got a Chromebook, and Acer C720, it seems to do much better at streaming even in 1080 resolution.

I also tried booting the J1900 with an Ubuntu Live USB drive (surprisingly that worked, despite the computer being Windows locked) and I think streaming was better on it in Linux than in Windows. Although the C720 might've performed better. The Ubuntu Live USB drive is only 1GB, so it doesn't have a lot of temporary space to work with, which might be some of the problems.

I'm thinking the issue is something within Windows, something running in the background that's taking up processor space. I'm thinking about trying to bypass the Windows boot lock and install a full blown Linux OS on there and see if that helps.

Yup that is what I would do. If it lags in 720p that is a driver or worse issue. Ask if you need help with anything, I used to be an admin over on the Ubuntu forum and I have six Linux machines running in my house right now.

 

[evident]

I wouldn't use Hulu as a gauge for anything. I think some of their encodes at least for PC streaming are flat out broken. I've had episodes in the same series go from smooth as butter to a choppy mess one from the next with not a thing to fix it.

could that have been unnoticable if you were using a faster pc though? what cpu / gpu were you using?

 

[aj654987]

I got a used Acer Revo RL80-UR22, I think I paid 300ish for it. It was the cheapest compact with a windows license I could find. It has a Core i3-3227U @ 1.90GHz, its been fast enough for playback of 1080p without issues which is all I need.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

could that have been unnoticable if you were using a faster pc though? what cpu / gpu were you using?

Q6600 & Radeon 6850. Old but should be adequate. I checked the loads on each and neither were being taxed much at all. Plus it was more than just choppiness, hard to explain, like frames blurred together. But even stuff that played "normally" wasn't as smooth as local video or other flash streams (like crackle) unless I used the old Hulu desktop app and an old flash version around 11.1. That combo is a world of difference than what I'm able to get out of FF or Chrome and current versions of flash on this same hardware. Butter smooth. I hope that's still working, a couple of days ago was the first time I've watched anything on Hulu in a long while and I didn't try the app, but it still wasn't smooth in a browser. I doubt it would even register for a lot of people though, like how some won't notice vsync tearing, telecining, etc, so I'm a but suspicious of "it's smooth on my hardware" claims. I think something's definitely wrong with Hulu somewhere, it just may not be apparent on all systems or to all eyes.

It just occurred to me, isn't the last Linux version of flash player something around 11.1? That might be why evotz is getting better playback there.