x264 PC requirements

[popper]

Originally Posted by brundles

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.

your going to have to give far more detail at least, about the average size your playing, and the container its inside,audio etc to get a far better reply/help.

1280x720p yes or no, bigger ,smaller, P or I etc

iv said this before, but if people want to ignore it then im thinking of leaving this board as its pointless and boring posting info if people dont respond with feedback etc.

right, to repeat and add some more info

CoreAVC is the current BEST/FASTEST AVC/H.264 software codec decoder out there... and takes far less CPU power for a given AVC video file.

its written for windows and if you want to play ANY AVC size content including hi-def *1024 AVC/H.264 content, that is your best choice.

oh and the coreplayer Mobile(AVC/AAC) is also the best player for windows Mobile devices such as the old Ipaq and better devices too.

'but im using linux not windows'.....
not a real problem... , there are people out there right now that are working on patching the coreAVC codec into linux32 apps as a windows plugin, and it seems to currently work for some content.

i cant say nearly all that windows coreAVC can as yet, but its getting better and so thats why you need to check your content is encoded as per the currently working samples and give these details/info in any posts for help etc.

im NOT going to do all the work for you, but heres some links to start you off, give your feedback here and elseware to help improve things if your willing.

also have you re-compiled Mplayer etc with optimal flags for your CPU to get best decode speeds, or just using the generic compile and so loosing lots of speed/wasted CPU cycles.

http://code.google.com/p/coreavc-for-linux/

http://code.google.com/p/coreavc-for...erInstallation

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp...er.cygwin/2228

http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-d...ead.html#47052

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-433403.html
"Here's my question: Are there any non-processor crippling h264 codecs available for Linux? (a la CoreAVC in Windows, which enabled you to run any HD h264 video with amazing effectiveness with a modest system). I use mplayer, and I have the codec pack that's offered by the makers of mplayer themselves. It enables me to run h264, but with terrible performance in most cases.

Any suggestion will be gladly received.

Hi WanderingKnight. Great question.

I just compiled mplayer from source and it seems they've been making improvements. I have a decent machine (Core 2 Duo E6600 with 2 GB of RAM), so it is hard to say what will or will not work for you. But, a fresh build of mplayer from SVN was able to play things which previously barely maxed out my CPU, and at around 60% CPU utilization on average. So, again, quite an improvement. The version in the feisty repos looks to be about 6 months old.

Anyway - that's just a thought. Another thing to consider is the mplayer from SVN was patched to allow integration of CoreAVC on i386 machines. I haven't attempted that.

Feel free to ask more questions - who knows if I can actually answer them, but I'll give it a whirl! \

- MrWizard"

as already said, you can probably find a faster CPu to drop in your motherboard but you didnt give that info.

also if you give the exact CPU and motherboard you might find an easy overclock to take it (2.6Ghz Celeron, 128K cache, 768MB memory) above this speed, although 2.6 with CoreAVC should play most lower bitrate 1280x720p without to many problems, dont forget to tell the audio format too or the container for that matter.

the GFX card will have an effect to some degree but even the old GeForce4 MX 440 with enough onboard ram can work with 720 at that 2.6 cpu speed.

the better option if your going to upgrade your gfx card at some point soon is to look to ATI today and really nothing below an AMD/ATI X1550 256meg and these come in AGP format as well as being reasonably cheap today.

the reason, AMD have now opened up their codebase and the linux driver devs are working with AMD now to take advantage of the X1's ability to hardware decode/assist mpeg2,vc1.AVC/H.264 one day, its not there yet, but it will be an advantage over Nvidia inside linux some time soon, unless Nvidea too open up their codebase instead of only releasing a black box binary.

coreavc on linux
http://search.virginmedia.com/result...9&cr=&start=20

[brundles]

richy99/keithwalton - The CPU does indeed max out at 100%, The board has a socket 478 - it's a Packard Bell Columbia 2 based on the Gigabyte GA-8SIML.

popper - That's a ton of good information - much more than I had expected and it's given me hope for the old box yet . It's going to take me some time to go through that and experiment with it but I will let you know how I get on - along with more information on the containers, contents and bitrates as a reference point. At the moment the box is running Ubuntu 6.06 with (in most cases) bog standard packages installed - including mplayer - and an oldish version at that.

Thanks again for all of the responses on this.

[keithwalton]

Its not good news on the upgrading the cpu front.
The board it seems is mid-life for the p4 and was very cheap! It can take upto the northwood 'a' chips but not the b or c.
So it can only take the 400mhz fsb chips but not the 533/800mhz ones. Which means P4 wise the fastest you can get is a 2.6GHz! and celeron wise a 2.8GHz chip.

Overclocking wise forget it since the board only supports the very basic fsb cpu's.

http://www.giga-byte.com.tw/Support/...ProductID=1335

[popper]

"it's a Packard Bell Columbia 2 based on the Gigabyte GA-8SIML."

is it this one?, a Columbia VI (GA-8SIML-NF6) Ver 2.0.
http://support.packardbell.com/uk/it...ube_ixtremeduo
"
CPU Support

• Socket mPGA 478B
• Supports Intel P4 FC-PGA2 (Flip-Chip Pin Grid Array), 1400 MHz to 3060 MHz.
• Warning: not all of the above processors have been qualified.
• 100 MHz (x4 = 400 MHz) data bus support (Quad-Bumped technology).
• 133 MHz (x4 = 533 MHz) data bus support (Quad-Bumped technology).

"
it also seems its not exactly the same, as this board unlike the old Gigabyte,cant take 2 gig ram only 1 gig max.

didnt look hard but i cant find any motherboard mods you might make to easly raise the clocks,volts etc, so no real overclocking werth doing there perhaps, thats yet another price people pay for buying all in one branded PCs, especially the older ones,no give in overclocking,expansion, as the firms have already cut back all their costs by not fitting the options.

If you gotta find a cpu then you may as well buy a mobo as well and get something new

[brundles]

keithwalton - I was afraid of that - they seem to have taken a low end board (actually, is that that low end for a 3 year old PC?) and made it lower.

popper - That's pretty much spot on - it came from an iXtreme 5 something or other. The limits on there match with those I read on the stuff that came with it after digging through.

I'm still playing around with rebuilding mplayer and the CoreAVC side of things at the moment. There is still a (fairly) clean Windows install on there (although from the recent "stealth patch" debacle I think Windows update is now broken on it) so I'll try CoreAVC on that to see whether it can cope on the Windows side too. From some of the posts I've found I think it's going to be borderline even with CoreAVC - although I'm still hopeful! The bulk of the files are 720p, 5.1 audio rolling in at about a gig for 40 minutes - not sure about the container though.

I may well be trawling through the many threads on here for mobo and cpu recommendations soon.

Oh, something else I came across yesterday that looked interesting was a mention of much greater levels of support for the onboard Intel chips to help with this sort of stuff instead of a seperate graphics card. But Intel and ATI now both seem to be offering better (i.e. more open and more complete) support for Linux now than Nvidia as you mentioned popper.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by popper

CoreAVC is the current BEST/FASTEST AVC/H.264 software codec decoder out there... and takes far less CPU power for a given AVC video file.

its written for windows and if you want to play ANY AVC size content including hi-def *1024 AVC/H.264 content, that is your best choice.

oh and the coreplayer Mobile(AVC/AAC) is also the best player for windows Mobile devices such as the old Ipaq and better devices too.

Agreed 100%.

[popper]

Originally Posted by brundles

keithwalton - I was afraid of that - they seem to have taken a low end board (actually, is that that low end for a 3 year old PC?) and made it lower.

popper - That's pretty much spot on - it came from an iXtreme 5 something or other. The limits on there match with those I read on the stuff that came with it after digging through.

I'm still playing around with rebuilding mplayer and the CoreAVC side of things at the moment. There is still a (fairly) clean Windows install on there (although from the recent "stealth patch" debacle I think Windows update is now broken on it) so I'll try CoreAVC on that to see whether it can cope on the Windows side too. From some of the posts I've found I think it's going to be borderline even with CoreAVC - although I'm still hopeful! The bulk of the files are 720p, 5.1 audio rolling in at about a gig for 40 minutes - not sure about the container though.

I may well be trawling through the many threads on here for mobo and cpu recommendations soon.

Oh, something else I came across yesterday that looked interesting was a mention of much greater levels of support for the onboard Intel chips to help with this sort of stuff instead of a seperate graphics card. But Intel and ATI now both seem to be offering better (i.e. more open and more complete) support for Linux now than Nvidia as you mentioned popper.

thats easy for the cheapest expandable way, just take what you already have, and get a ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA PT880 Ultra Socket 775 and a cheap celeron 2.8Gig CPU to put in there to just get it up and running.

total price at the time to get the lads machine slightly above his old AMD i payed around £67.

i did a simple 2 minute bios overclock for it with ddr400 in there, and it ran at 3.4 on a crappy standard cooler that came in the retail box, infact i spend more time fitting that cooler as the plastic clips were out of spec and kept popping out the MB, i ended up bending the cooler legs down to take off the presure on the clips and it worked fine.

that machine with its ATI X1550 played all the AVC great, far better than any of the older ones, still adding to it as time passes, sometime ill put a Q6600 in there.

http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/19...l#post34369550

'the only real downside was it only has 2 SATA for later, and takes only 2 sticks of eather DDR or DDR2.'

'the Intel ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA (IDE[4]/SATA[2], DDR/DDR2, AGP/PCi-Express)'

iv found out since that you can run both the AGP and PCi-E at the same time at no loss of speed.

BTW , BetaBoy the core CEO , finally gave some release info about the CoreAVC Encoder.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...29#post1049629
"
...
Lastly.... 'drum roll please'......

I'd like to annouce that starting in late October we will be doing a closed (initially) beta for our upcoming CoreAVC Encoder Editions. Please no PM's yet on it but so far I think that ppl will be happy with whats coming (I know we are). We will ask some of the Doom9 Elite at first to have a go and tell us what they are finding."

that might be interesting in time.

i do wonder if they will get the same or even better Encoder speeds as the ATI Xcode software encoder, but with far more options as per the AVC/H.264 standard.....

(NOT FOR BEGINNERS) but for the extream,this search will give you some insight into how fast you can take it, and even simple CPU pencil,blanking tape mods.
http://search.virginmedia.com/result...l-VSTA+mods&cr=

http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?t=125970
http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?t=93127
http://sg.vr-zone.com/?i=757

[keithwalton]

It sounds like you are getting the 'mkv' (Matroska) files, they are notoriously hard to decode.

If your going to upgrade do it properly and get decent kit all round. The only reason i suggested upping the cpu was because it would be a single component change which would of cost you a tenner or so. But sadly the board you have just isnt upto it

[popper]

yep, Keith is right, i hate mkv containers SOMETIMES , they are great for allowing you to put anything with anything in there, but real bad right now for decoding on lower spec Hardware.

this is were your choice of splitter as well as codecs and using the right Encoding options to start with makes a big difference.

[brundles]

Yep you're right - I've just checked a sample file and it's the mkv.

Ah well, nevermind - I've got a load more dev libraries installed on the box now for a (currently running) rebuild of MPlayer (which has been entertaining in it's own way) but it looks like for now I'll have to start looking at the upgrade route. I'll just need to convince the missus how vital these mkv files are and that the 350MB divx files just aren't good enough

I'm going to carry on with MPlayer and Core AVC as a learning exercise anyway (given the benefits I'll probably use it on the upgraded system) and will let you know if I have any success - but given the expertise here I think that boat has well and truely sailed now .

[popper]

its might be interesting for you to also use Mplayer in windows to compare, its not right upto the minute date, but on my travels i came across this one(untryed by me so cant say good/bad) .

http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer-win32.php
"
...
Please don't use aggressive download managers (wget is fine) there is no single connection bandwith limit.
Mplayer on win32 using mingw32 - Last Build on Sep 15, 2007
CoreAVC support is not so stable, I suspect it doesn't uninit correctly, if you use the GUI, you will easy get a crash.
Please give me some feedbacks about crashes while encoding x264 and xvid on p4/core2 cpu.
...
"

---------- Post added at 15:39 ---------- Previous post was at 14:44 ----------

unfortunataly many of the lads and lasses on doom9 seem obsessed with the mkv container.

but you can demux/re-mux to another container without re-encoding anything,with some good tools, so its also fast,and no loss of original quality.

i also suspect the mkv's your struggling with on that machine, have lots of extra stuff inside them (more than one audio track,subs etc), so a change of container with just the one video and audio track might make a lot of difference overall to lower end systems.

personally i like the TS (transport stream) container (the one all the broadcasters use for DVB* ,DVB-C being what your VM stb takes splits the channel your watching and stuffs it on your TV)as its faster to split etc.

and on the mailing lists someone just asking for info as hes working "to add support to mplayer and ffmpeg for LATM AAC as carried in DVB"
so thats another good thing, AAC being the matching audio codec for the AVC Video codec.

[brundles]

Well the rebuild of MPlayer (including a rebuild of the X264 sources to make them CPU specific, but currently minus CoreAVC) has shown significant improvements - not enough to make it watchable yet but a massive difference all the same. The Ubuntu default build of Mplayer and X264 seems to be none CPU specific and suffer heavily for it - as a few other people have reported where MPlayer plays a file fine on Debian but not on Ubuntu.

Using the -framedrop option now shows a regularly changing picture keeping up with the audio rather than just blackness because it can't keep up at all. Without the -framedrop option the slow motion isn't anything like as bad.

Next step - put coreavc into the middle of it and see what happens.

I'll take a look at shifting to other containers as well. For now at least that wouldn't really bother me - once the download is done the downloader kicks a script that does a load of other stuff including renaming and appropriately filing AVIs downloaded so it probably wouldn't take much to extend it to automatically shifting stuff contained in mkvs into another container.

Thanks again for all of the help on this!

[keithwalton]

I have just tried one of my old 720p x264 files on my new laptop and without any customisation of codecs etc (just vista codec pack) they work fine with a cpu usage of 35-45% for windows media player.

Its only a 1.66GHz core 2 duo! I'm playing them over a wifi connection as well! It does speedstep the cpu down to 1.33GHz as well which would explain why it goes up from 35 to 45% as i loose 20% of my clockspeed.

I'm not sure if the video card is doing any decode assist, i havent set it up but its a AMD HD 2400

[brundles]

That's just showing off now!

I've not had a chance to play around with CoreAVC or on the Windows partition yet but I'll let you know how I get on.