x264 PC requirements

brundles · 03-10-2007, 11:00

Can anyone give me an idea of what sort of hardware requirements they'd suggest as a baseline for an x264 capable system?

The PC in it's current state (2.6Ghz Celeron, 128K cache, 768MB memory) can't cope and most of the stuff I download has stopped appearing in the 700mb HR state with x264 rapidly becoming the norm.

Richy99 · 03-10-2007, 11:06

i would have thought for just playing the format it would be sufficient or are you encoding itl?

brundles · 03-10-2007, 11:20

Playback only - it can't quite keep up

. It plays a few seconds and starts to go out of sync, then glitches as it stops to resync when it realises.

Richy99 · 03-10-2007, 11:32

what video card you got? it might not be rendering it quick enough and what media player you using?

brundles · 03-10-2007, 12:15

An old Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440 using MPlayer on Linux.

Aragorn · 03-10-2007, 12:49

I've had various 'issues' with MPlayer before now. I usually use VLC media player which you should be able to apt-get. Might also be the MX440 isn't man enough, but I would try VLC first.

keithwalton · 03-10-2007, 12:51

what resolution are the files ?
high definition ones like 1280x720p a 2.6 celly will struggle as i believe the recomended computer is a 2.4 AMD 64, 3GHz P4 or 1.8GHz core 2 duo

brundles · 03-10-2007, 12:55

I'll give VLC another go (and upgrade it) - although it seemed to throw a bit of a strop about the whole x264 thing in general.

keith - Yes, they are HD and is the reason I don't think the PC can cope. As you say, it's a lot of data to crunch through.

03-10-2007, 14:49

I use cccp codecs and media player classic

brundles · 03-10-2007, 15:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by zinglebarb

I use cccp codecs and media player classic

That's Windows though isn't it?

03-10-2007, 15:17

well you asked for requirements lol

brundles · 03-10-2007, 15:19

True

Must admit I hadn't thought that the gfx card itself could make much of a difference. There's a few things I'm going to play around with on the PC to see if they help but if it's borderline then I might finally rebuild the thing to a higher spec - just wondered what the minimum was and whether I could get away without spending too much money.

I'd rather not buy a better gfx card only to find it's really the CPU and then have a GFX card that isn't much good for the replacement board thjat's needed for the CPU.

03-10-2007, 15:36

you could just get the xvid with dd audio instead still pretty good quality

Richy99 · 03-10-2007, 16:12

whats the cpu usuage like during play back?

keithwalton · 03-10-2007, 17:56

Yup check the cpu usage i'd suspect it would be hitting 100% quite easily. x264 is the most cpu intensive codec to date.

The graphics card wont make any difference as your card wont be involved with any of the processing.
Some of the more modern mainstream cards (nvidia 8600 and amd 2600, note not the 8800 or 2900) can offload some of the x264 decoding from the cpu and do it themselves.

However all of these cards are pci-e. older cards can do some of the offloading but thats for codecs like mpeg 2 and not x264.

It might be worth checking if any post-processing is enabled (noise reduction, deinterlacing etc) as this will add to the cpu requirements.

What socket is the cely' ? you might be able to pick up a faster chip on the cheap as the celeron was rarely ever the fastest the platform could take (exception being the s370 days)