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Where's my bottle-neck? DVD only 11fps over LAN

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Dogpigboy

Member
This is the set-up. Two pc's connected over a 100mbps LAN.

PC1. Athlon 2800+ with DVD player

PC2. AMD k6 500mhz with Radeon 7000 PCI 32M DDR

Using Media Player Classic on PC2 to access - over the LAN - a DVD on PC1.

It works, but I only get 11fps and the sound is choppy.

So why only 11fps? where is the bottle-neck?

The LAN bandwidth only has 5% utilisation so that's ok. The graphics cards in PC2 is supposed to have DVD (mpeg2) hardware decoding.

Now the CPU - (cranky old AMD K6 500 in PC2) - is showing 100% utilisation when accessing DVD over the LAN so it appears that the bottle-neck is here? But why? I'm sure I've heard DVD being played on a lower spec machine.

Any suggestions for testing and being absolutely sure its the CPU that's causing the bottle-neck?


 
dude the radeon assists with the decoding, it doesnt take it over completely. Your CPU is the main culprit here.

Hell when the K6 came out there were no DVDs ;-)
 
Originally posted by: Dogpigboy

Now the CPU - (cranky old AMD K6 500 in PC2) - is showing 100% utilisation when accessing DVD over the LAN so it appears that the bottle-neck is here? But why? I'm sure I've heard DVD being played on a lower spec machine.
Click to expand...

you pretty much answered your own question
 
Lower-spec machines did play DVDs, but using a dedicated full MPEG2 hardware decoding card like the old Creative cards.

Time to hit the FS/FT forum for a used Duron or P3 CPU+mobo. For a P3 500 MHz should be plenty. For high-res divx you should get something thats 800 MHz or better.
 
Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
Lower-spec machines did play DVDs, but using a dedicated full MPEG2 hardware decoding card like the old Creative cards.

Time to hit the FS/FT forum for a used Duron or P3 CPU+mobo. For a P3 500 MHz should be plenty. For high-res divx you should get something thats 800 MHz or better.
Click to expand...

Maybe. I had a laptop with a P3 750, and it was a little bit jumpy when playing a DVD on its own drive. Over a LAN - that might add an additional performance hit. I'm not sure though - I've never tried to play a DVD over a network.

But if the CPU usage is at 100, and you're at 11fps, I'd guess that a processor more than 2x faster (not counting optimizations like SSE or MMX pro) would be needed for 30fps playback.

Either that, or else a dedicated MPEG2 decoder card might do the trick. I don't know if they play nice with a network file; I have no experience with them. I don't know if they can detect MPEG2 video data and automatically play it, or how they work.
 
It's probably compounding things if the NIC is being driven in part by the CPU. Have you tried playing the DVD on the slower machine? Tried copying it to the hard disk on the slower machine too?

If that works better, then either replace the NIC with a decent one, change the PCI slot it's in, or upgrade 🙂
 
Thanks greatly chaps - it's unanimous then - the processors isn't up to it. Will try the tests mentioned though. Just in the middle of macking a vcd, since its a four-fold lower bit rate, to see how that plays.

Think it really is time I got myself some new old gear.

 
I recall that iDCT is not functional on PCI models however even if it was I am not sure if the libmpeg2 decoder intergrated in MPC would be most efficient. You might try the Cyberlink decoder (PowerDVD trial or ATI freebee, etc.) which should at least show whether HWA is active. The audio side is just as relevant though if being downmixed. Also, while MPC is great, VideoLAN may be better suited. In any case, the CPU limitation may still not be overcome as it is borderline.
 
Just for shits and giggles, you may want to do the following:

* Just transfer a large file over the network to the PC2, just to get an idea of what kind of CPU usage you're encountering for just using the NIC.

* Go with Auric's reccomendation of trying another decoder. Intervideo WinDVD for example will tell you what mode it's working in under it's "Info" tab, so if you aren't getting a note saying it's using DXVA there, then you're basically screwed 🙁
 
ok interesting ideas..

.. and just for interest..

I transfered a 1Gb file from the new to the old pc over the LAN. This resulted in 100% cpu utilisation on the old pc and 5% utilisation on the new pc.

The LAN (100mbps) utilisation during this process was about 39% peaking occasionally at 50%.

If the cpu on the old pc is 100% utilised at about 39mbps and a DVD (shrinkripped) plays at 4 to 5mbps
then the cpu utilisation playing a dvd over the LAN would be 5/39 - or abou 13%: leaving about87% left for playing the DVD. (assuming it valid to do a stright forward proportional calculation like this)

Will try PowerDVD. Not sure what all those acroynms mean 🙂

 
FYI, CPU usage isn't usually linear with bandwidth, so the CPU usage is likely higher than 13% when watching a DVD.
 
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