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How would this hardware work for XBMC? - Printable Version

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How would this hardware work for XBMC? - traderstavros - 2008-09-02

I see that there is no central location for discussing hardware to work with XMBC so despite being a newly registered user I would create a thread that did just that and kick it off with my question. If this is trampling on forum rules or etiquette please delete this with my apologies. This would be a great place for quick one-off questions though that don't clutter the main forum.

Purpose: Playing 720p (and eventually 1080p) content over HDMI and either coax or optical for audio. No DVR, minimal gaming (if any) but wouldn't mind ability to upgrade to modest gaming.

Processor: Athlon X2 4850e (some research I have done shows that a Core 2 Duo may be needlessly overpowered for this purpose, please correct me if I am wrong here)
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H (onboard HDMI on the Radeon HD 3200, has optical out for audio)
Video: Onboard ATI Radeon HD 3200
Audio : Onboard surround on motherboard via optical
Power Supply: undecided, will get appropriate one when decided
RAM: 2 or 4 GB. Have not decided the brand/etc. Minor point IMO, just need to know the minimum and go from there
Hard Drive: 250gb perhaps, not important as will mainly hold the OS and some temporary files with the storage being on externals and/or NAS
Optical Drive: DVD-RW I have laying around until I feel like adding a Blu-ray down the road.
Input: Haven't decided, immaterial at this point.
Case: Haven't decided, immaterial at this point.

My purpose is to get a low cost, well-performing HTPC for HD content, so it has to handle MKV files well enough. So what say you? Will this perform well?

Thanks!

- vcasinha - 2008-09-02

Hi,

I have a machine with the following specs:

Motherboard: Asus M3N78-EMH HDMI (Geforce 8200 with HD support)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4050e

It is perfect for 720p, but it fails playing 1080p (MKV or other format).

Hope it helps.

- traderstavros - 2008-09-02

vcasinha Wrote:Hi,

I have a machine with the following specs:

Motherboard: Asus M3N78-EMH HDMI (Geforce 8200 with HD support)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4050e

It is perfect for 720p, but it fails playing 1080p (MKV or other format).

Hope it helps.

Do you believe it is the video card or the lack of a Core 2 Duo?

Thank you for the response.

- Gamester17 - 2008-09-02

traderstavros Wrote:Do you believe it is the video card or the lack of a Core 2 Duo?
It is the lack of a powerful processor, XBMC does not feature any GPU hardware acceleration. AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600 can probably play most 1080p H.264 videos out there but not all, for that you need an ever faster processor, (and yes the fact is that Intel Core 2 Duo outperforms AMD Athlon 64 X2 running at the same megahertz).

- traderstavros - 2008-09-02

Gamester17 Wrote:It is the lack of a powerful processor, XBMC does not feature any GPU hardware acceleration. AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600 can probably play most 1080p H.264 videos out there but not all, for that you need an ever faster processor, (and yes the fact is that Intel Core 2 Duo outperforms AMD Athlon 64 X2 running at the same megahertz).

Thanks gamester, that makes sense as I didn't realize that XBMC didn't do the acceleration. Could you recommend an appropriate C2D as a minimum for good performance so I can have a benchmark to work from?

- o_neill - 2008-09-02

traderstavros Wrote:Thanks gamester, that makes sense as I didn't realize that XBMC didn't do the acceleration.
Nevertheless there's a project going on concerning GPU-assisted enconding of HD-content: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=33802
But there weren't any new results posted. Anyhow this will take months until it would be usable in XBMC.

I'm also in the process of finding appropriate hardware. There are already a few threads in the forum considering performance and HTPC-hardware. As already mentioned the CPU performance is the key.
My question is: Does XBMC take advantage of multithreaded CPUs? I mean would e.g. an AMD Phenom Quad-Core 4x2600Mhz perform better than a Athlon64 X2 Dual-Core with the same CPU frequency?

- Cam73 - 2008-09-03

My HTPC is:

Core2Duo E8600 (3.33GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 6Mb cache) - selected for high clock speed as multi core support seems absent at this point.

GeForece 8500GT - with HDMI connector

Onboard digital sound output

(also, 250Gb HDD, 2Gb RAM, Vista Ultimate SP1)

This has played everything ive thrown at it completly shudder free.

I have extracted the m2v file from a bunch of BluRay disks and put them on my server - this setup plays all the blueray files perfectly... the only problem is that XBMC doesnt seem to support the DTS-HD sound track so i can only select from the AC3 audio tracks.. but they play fine)

- Gamester17 - 2008-09-03

Cam73 Wrote:selected for high clock speed as multi core support seems absent at this point
Yes, XBMC does currently not scale well with more cores than two, so a higher megahertz dual-core is faster than a lower megahertz quad-core.

Many people have reported that a Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3.0GHz) is able to perfectly playback 99,99% of all 1080p H.264 videos they tried.

Cam73 Wrote:XBMC doesnt seem to support the DTS-HD sound track so i can only select from the AC3 audio tracks.. but they play fine)
That is correct. FFmpeg does not yet support DTS-HD, see: http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Codec_and_Format_requests

When FFmpeg add support for it then XBMC will not be far behind support it too.

- xsintill - 2008-09-03

My pc has died on me and I am considering to buy a new mainboard and processor.
It would be nice to play 1080p without any problems.

Does anybody know if this is possible with the Intel DG45FC Mini ITX board and a core 2 duo e8600 3.33 processor.

- Player4 - 2008-09-03

My X2 3800+ EE SFF (2 x 2,0 Ghz) plays, for example, Pirates of the Caribbean - 18 GB .mkv, Blu-ray rip, 1080p flawless. That's with onBoard Nvidia 7050 and just 1 GB RAM.

- traderstavros - 2008-09-03

Player4 Wrote:My X2 3800+ EE SFF (2 x 2,0 Ghz) plays, for example, Pirates of the Caribbean - 18 GB .mkv, Blu-ray rip, 1080p flawless. That's with onBoard Nvidia 7050 and just 1 GB RAM.

Interesting. Albeit just confusing me more! Is it possible that it just wasn't 'that' complex of a 1080p copy? AMD is obviously the more affordable route to go and I'm not interested in buying something with more power than I really need.

Newegg has the 5400+ on sale for $77, that is very tempting if it will work.

- Scha - 2008-09-03

My HTPC setup (got new parts and upgraded yesterday):
C2D E8400 3.0GHz
ABIT I-N73HD Motherboard
2 x 1 GB RAM
2x 500 GB HDD
Hauppauge PVR-150

All this is shoved into a Antec Fusion V2 and it works VERY well. I got to give two thumbs up to the mother board. Its fairly cheap, and got HDMI and optical output. It also has firewire (which is not yet on all motherboards for some reason) so you can connect digital video cameras.

I just switched from MediaPortal to XBMC and I'm pretty happy so far. I'm going to set up TVEngine3 for the Hauppauge card. I think I read somewhere that XBMC got a plugin for using it as a source. So far I have figured out how to use the Hauppauge remote, and it was a little bit tricky, so if anyone have trouble just PM me and I'll help you out.

- traderstavros - 2008-09-03

Scha Wrote:My HTPC setup (got new parts and upgraded yesterday):
C2D E8400 3.0GHz
ABIT I-N73HD Motherboard
2 x 1 GB RAM
2x 500 GB HDD
Hauppauge PVR-150

All this is shoved into a Antec Fusion V2 and it works VERY well. I got to give two thumbs up to the mother board. Its fairly cheap, and got HDMI and optical output. It also has firewire (which is not yet on all motherboards for some reason) so you can connect digital video cameras.

I just switched from MediaPortal to XBMC and I'm pretty happy so far. I'm going to set up TVEngine3 for the Hauppauge card. I think I read somewhere that XBMC got a plugin for using it as a source. So far I have figured out how to use the Hauppauge remote, and it was a little bit tricky, so if anyone have trouble just PM me and I'll help you out.

How is it doing with 1080p content? Some reviews on Newegg state that it won't do it. Looks like a very affordable solution if it does 1080p fine.

- Gamester17 - 2008-09-03

traderstavros Wrote:
Player4 Wrote:My X2 3800+ EE SFF (2 x 2,0 Ghz) plays, for example, Pirates of the Caribbean - 18 GB .mkv, Blu-ray rip, 1080p flawless. That's with onBoard Nvidia 7050 and just 1 GB RAM.
Interesting. Albeit just confusing me more! Is it possible that it just wasn't 'that' complex of a 1080p copy? AMD is obviously the more affordable route to go and I'm not interested in buying something with more power than I really need
Yes that is not only possible, it must be the case if traderstavros really used XBMC to play it back (and not a other software which feature the GPU harware acceleration that XBMC lacks).

The first-generation Blu-ray movies used to be encoded with MPEG-2, not H.264, and MPEG-2 is much less 'complex' than H.264 decode, so it is either that or it is a H.264 video with very low bit-rate (which takes much less processing power to decode that a high bit-rate H.264 video). Most likely though that particular movie was just encoded with MPEG-2.

- traderstavros - 2008-09-03

Gamester17 Wrote:Yes that is not only possible, it must be the case if traderstavros really used XBMC to play it back (and not a other software which feature the GPU harware acceleration that XBMC lacks).

The first-generation Blu-ray movies used to be encoded with MPEG-2, not H.264, and MPEG-2 is much less 'complex' than H.264 decode, so it is either that or it is a H.264 video with very low bit-rate (which takes much less processing power to decode that a high bit-rate H.264 video). Most likely though that particular movie was just encoded with MPEG-2.

Ok, then to absolve all about I'm just going to get a C2D and leaning toward the 8400. Would the Radeon 3200 HD work fine? Is there a good place to see the minimums for hardware? I want to get ordering, but the last thing I want to do is get it all home and realize I can't do what I want with it.