Video Playback--Harddrive or Ram?

[s4man]

Hey,

I was wondering about full screen video playback, b/c I am having a stuttering problem.
My question is it hard drive (20gig 7200 2 mg cache) or ram (192 Meg PC100) thats most of the problem?
By the way Its a P3 500 Machine....

I really would like to fix the problem as cheap as possible as this is just the internet terminal machine, but I cant take the stutter. I have a video editing machine, AMD 1.3 gig, 1.5 gig PC133, 80 gig 8 mg system, 2x250 A/V drives, and she plays anything smooth as day........although I dont know if its ram or hdd thats doing it.

Thanks in Advance

 

[AIWGuru]

So...you want smooth fullscreen playback on a 500mhz machine. Hmm...
Is this DivX by any chance? If so, you may be out of luck.

 

[s4man]

Yeah, divx....

Prior to this machine.....I used the AMD listed above as a Duron 600, 1.5 gig PC133, and the 80 gig 8 mg system, and a 120 gig 8 mg A/V drive.

I just *figured* that the 500 would be similar.......and work. Hey I got it free, they were tossing it at work, so I made the old machine (AMD) the a/v station, and made the P3 500 the internet machine.

So will anything tie me over? Like some more ram or another hard drive set up as a slave a/v drive?

Just trying to make this work, and be cheap like I said before.

I am trying to save money and set up a AMD 64 system, with SATA Drives and all the good stuff.
I would like to keep this P3 500 as my internet and keep the AMD 64 off the net,

Anyone got the answers here? (That I want to hear)...Thats something along the lines of toss in a 512 stick or drop in a 80 gig WD JB drive and be all set.

Or the truth

By the way THanks AIWGURU....

 

[Soulkeeper]

yeah divx uses massive cpu power these days
might wanna get something over 1ghz
i couldn't even watch a half screen divx movie on my 600 athlon very well

this is the order of your problems:

cpu
memory (shouldn't need a whole lot for this kinda thing)
motherboard

anything else is secondary to your divx problem


also if you are running winxp then you might want atleast 256mb just for the os "experience" to be smooth and 512mb if you actually wanna run this kinda stuff better


good luck

 

[s4man]

Now for a curiousity ? here,

So Hard drive isnt really a factor at all here?
The reason I ask is b/c the when video editing, the most important item is seperate hard drives to write scratch to, and export to...etc.

I just assumed if I dropped a fast hard drive, (8mg cache) into my machine, then I would be ok.

I am desperately trying to not upgrade, and focus all my money into my new system, but I guess I can build like a XP1800 system, for around 150 and keep all my old stuff, p/s....case, hard drive and stuff.

So now I guess the real question is,
Lets see some for sale posts.....

Thanks a lot all.....
Damn Divx

 

[IPLaw]

What's your CPU usage when you are playing back divx files? That should help answer your question.

 

[AIWGuru]

NO. The hard drive isn't the problem. This data is highly compressed and as such the storage subsystem is not under pressure. The CPU which is responsible for decompressing and displaying the data is under pressure. Divx uses a lot of really sophisticated tricks to do what it does and it costs big Mhz.

 

[Anonemous]

I did for some time use a PIII -450 as a divx box. Just make sure you load only the bare essentials (no norton, fresh install, etc...) . I had it with the FFDSHOW codec and it played most divx files just fine with win2k OS and 512 megs of ram along with a 4 year old hd (ata33, 5400rpm). It would pixelate some .ogms but I think that might've been a video codec problem (was using a ati rage pro card). No skips were seen but you would not be able to multitask while divx was running (like moving media files while playing the movie). Now those .mkv files might give you trouble but divx/xvid/ogm/SVCD was not a problem.

edit: Another thing, I would not recommend WinXP for OS since it really made my divx files skip so anything below Win2k should be fine.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: Anonemous
I did for some time use a PIII -450 as a divx box. Just make sure you load only the bare essentials (no norton, fresh install, etc...) . I had it with the FFDSHOW codec and it played most divx files just fine with win2k OS and 512 megs of ram along with a 4 year old hd (ata33, 5400rpm). It would pixelate some .ogms but I think that might've been a video codec problem (was using a ati rage pro card). No skips were seen but you would not be able to multitask while divx was running (like moving media files while playing the movie). Now those .mkv files might give you trouble but divx/xvid/ogm/SVCD was not a problem.

edit: Another thing, I would not recommend WinXP for OS since it really made my divx files skip so anything below Win2k should be fine.

To add... And no drive compression. Drive compression eats CPU bandwidth too. You will really notice this issue if you do digital video capture too.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: AIWGuru
NO. The hard drive isn't the problem. This data is highly compressed and as such the storage subsystem is not under pressure. The CPU which is responsible for decompressing and displaying the data is under pressure. Divx uses a lot of really sophisticated tricks to do what it does and it costs big Mhz.

The resolution of the Divx file is a big factor too. If it's only half res, like 360x240, (or is it technically quarter? 1/2 the dimensions per side, 1/4 the overall area) then the CPU has much less data to decode, and it can probably play that smoothly on a P3 500. Full res, like 720x480, and you'll probably want a CPU closer to 1GHz; maybe 900Mhz should do it fine, with no extra filters enabled, like deinterlacing for instance.
But everything else will do fine - the data doesn't have to come off the hard drive very fast; maybe only like 4MB/sec if even close to that, which won't seriously tax even a slower laptop hard drive, much less a desktop drive.
So if you can re-encode these files at a lower resolution for playback on the P3, that'd probably be the way to go until you get enough money for a new system.

To add... And no drive compression. Drive compression eats CPU bandwidth too. You will really notice this issue if you do digital video capture too

That, and I'd imagine that drive compression wouldn't do a thing for any video that's already compressed using MPEG/AVI, as it's just trying to recompress something that's already been squished down pretty thoroughly - like trying to ZIP an RAR file.

 

[AIWGuru]

Originally posted by: Jeff7

Originally posted by: AIWGuru
NO. The hard drive isn't the problem. This data is highly compressed and as such the storage subsystem is not under pressure. The CPU which is responsible for decompressing and displaying the data is under pressure. Divx uses a lot of really sophisticated tricks to do what it does and it costs big Mhz.

The resolution of the Divx file is a big factor too. If it's only half res, like 360x240, (or is it technically quarter? 1/2 the dimensions per side, 1/4 the overall area) then the CPU has much less data to decode, and it can probably play that smoothly on a P3 500. Full res, like 720x480, and you'll probably want a CPU closer to 1GHz; maybe 900Mhz should do it fine, with no extra filters enabled, like deinterlacing for instance.
But everything else will do fine - the data doesn't have to come off the hard drive very fast; maybe only like 4MB/sec if even close to that, which won't seriously tax even a slower laptop hard drive, much less a desktop drive.
So if you can re-encode these files at a lower resolution for playback on the P3, that'd probably be the way to go until you get enough money for a new system.

To add... And no drive compression. Drive compression eats CPU bandwidth too. You will really notice this issue if you do digital video capture too

That, and I'd imagine that drive compression wouldn't do a thing for any video that's already compressed using MPEG/AVI, as it's just trying to recompress something that's already been squished down pretty thoroughly - like trying to ZIP an RAR file.

Much, much worse. Divx uses some very sophisticated tricks related to only changing parts of frames from one to the next and others that I don't even understand. Makes zip and rar look like simple reference tables for repeated characters...

 

[NokiaDude]

1. Un-install DivX.
2. Install ffdshow.
3. Goto configuration and turn on the postprocessing effects all the way to the right.
4. PROFIT!!!

 

[s4man]

OK,

Thanks all.....

Guess I will toss in a better chip....one of my friends has a P3 933MHZ or something equal to that...So I will just drop that in, or buy something...Whatever my board wants or accepts should I say.

Thanks for all your help...

Damn you guys for making me upgrade