[xbmcbubba]

This question relates to LIVE (couldn't change the title...)

Probably like quite a few people I've got quite a few .MKV 720/1080 HD media files, but my Plasma TV is just 480p.

My basic Athlon 3200+ system with a Nforce 430/GeForce 6150 board can play the MKV's but they do stutter occasionally in very complex/busy scenes.

Firstly, is there any less CPU load when downsampling HD playback to 480p? (playback resolution does not seem to have a major impact, as far as I can tell...)


With respect to playback performance, would a dual-core Athlon X2, of the same actual CPU speed (2GHz) as a Venice-based 3200+ help playback?

Also, how much RAM is actually required for XBMC live? Is there any point going over 1GB? Any performance gains with 2GB, 2.5GB, 3GB?



Thanks.

[jmarshall]

To answer your first question, there's little to no decrease in CPU when downsampling - you still have to decode the video. Some decreases I believe *might* be possible as some codecs have the ability to do half-sized decoding - we currently do this for anything larger than a certain pixel rate for the xbox only. See CDVDFactoryCodec::CreateVideoCodec if you wish to try it out for yourself.

Scaling is done on the GPU, so that side of it doesn't matter much.

Cheers,
Jonathan