what can I do to make it faster

[todpod]

or play videos better. Its a P4 running at about 2.6ghz with 640 megabytes of ram, with an old AGP video card. OS is Lubuntu and the player is VLC. Most Videos I have play fine. The video causing problems is a bluray rip of Star Trek. The action scenes stuttered most of it was watchable. It wasn't watch before I upgraded to 640 megabytes from 512. I am going to try and pull some memory from a dell I have to get it to a full meg, not sure if it is compatible yet. Any settings I can change, different players etc that I can do to help.

Short of throwing it out what can I do to help. Memory seems to really help but that is limited.

 

[Jodell88]

I'm pretty sure that computer is too weak to handle Blu-Ray.

 

[todpod]

It actually played fairly respectfully. Upgrading memory to a gig it would probably be ok. I am not sure I have the parts to do that, I am going to try. Not sure if finding a better video driver would help.

 

[Jodell88]

Video driver may help if your card supports .h264 hardware acceleration and the driver allows for it.

 

[Maximilian]

Ditch it and get something better.

Seriously people have left computers several times faster in dumpsters 😱

 

[lxskllr]

I'm not familiar with video. The stuff I watch it low res. More ram, and overclock if you can. You could also transcode the video to something more manageable. That would take time, but you could let the machine crunch that while you sleep.

 

[Anteaus]

The bottom line is that you are pushing a single core platform that has long outlasted it's service life. It's not just the cpu but the overall bandwidth that your chipset can provide you. I applaud you for maintaining it for so long, but I think it's time to upgrade. It's not just performance consideration....there are potentially huge power savings in switching to a more recent low power solutions from Intel and AMD.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Short of throwing it out what can I do to help. Memory seems to really help but that is limited.

While playing the video, run htop (or top, if you prefer) and which the processor and memory utilization. Decoding a video is processor intensive in any case (particularly for your platform), but if you're running into a memory bottleneck, you'll see your physical memory maxed out as well.

That being said, based on my experience with other machines of the same age, you're almost certainly processor-constrained, and there's nothing you can do about that other than offloading your decoding to a co-processor (like a video card), getting a faster processor, or using a lighter decoding algorithm.

 

[todpod]

Upgrading the computer is the ideal but that's not going to happen just yet. Might try to transcode just to try.

I do like those nice little ITX boards they have at newegg, probably go with AMD because that's pretty much what I have always done.

 

[Scarpozzi]

While playing the video, run top and watch your total processor utilization and the VLC proc utilization... Also keep an eye on your available memory... That will tell you if you're seeing issues with Processor/RAM limitations or a slow disk. Based on the age of your system, your hard drive is probably running with very little cache....newer drives spin the same speeds, roughly, but can fetch and stream data faster (higher throughput).

Another thing to consider is swap space location and how much you have configured on your system...going hand-in-hand with your hard drive speed limitations, if you're running out of RAM and it's having to write to swap for buffering, you could be getting dinged twice on your hard drive throughput. Consider either adding a second older drive to move your swap to, or increasing RAM and swap on the second drive if you're not over 60% on your processor utilization.