HD Video Playback With A $20 CPU & $30 GPU On Linux

[nrnrnr]

For simple playback 2GB are not necessary.

Thanks for the advice. It sounds like a plan is to go with one stick of 1GB RAM and then add a second stick if/when I upgrade the optical drive to a Blu-ray player. My main concern at this point is high-definition H.264.

[Kano]

For simple movie playback with linux 2 gb are not necessary - in case you will upgrade to bluray and then need sometimes win 2 gb would be better.

[nrnrnr]

Is 2GB necessary?

I'd like to reproduce the original results using existing parts where possible. It looks like the cheapest option is

- Nvidia GeForce 210 fanless low profile GPU (512MB): $40
- AMD Sempron 140 Sargas: $36
- Suitable micro-ATX motherboard (sadly, with integrated GPU): $50
- 2GB DDR2/800 RAM: $50

At these prices, cutting from 2GB RAM to 1GB RAM would save significantly on the price (my wife is indulging me). But I would like to be able to play h.264 encoded 1080p content, since my TV supports 1080p. Should I pay $50 for a full 2GB RAM, or will $25 for 1GB RAM suffice? Getting the full cost under $150 would be a bonus.

(I have a case already paid for and can repurpose optical drive and hard drives from existing systems that have reached retirement age.)

[83bj]

Sparkle and Albatron

http://www.sparkle.com.tw

http://www.albatron.com.tw

http://www.albatron.com.tw/English/news/news_detail.asp?new=default&news_id=268

http://www.sparkle.com.tw/News/8400GSPCI/news_sp_8400GS_PCI_EN.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_9

...Google is your friend

Thanks for this information!

Honestly, it was a extremely difficult to find one of the PCI-Cards here in Europe. Nearly everything you find is PCIe. I live in Germany and the only shops I could find which sell those cards were from the US, but they wouldn't ship this item to Europe for some reason. (NewEgg, Tigerdirect and even Amazon.com)

Finally I came across a German Onlineshop which sells one of the Sparcle-cards for ? 60, which is about $ 76. Crap! I believe, there is a very small market for PCI-cards here in EU.

[Gamester17]

Hi!

You write "The GeForce 8400GS is available in a PCI model for those wanting to use this low-end graphics card on say an Intel Atom system"

Does this model have another name? I couldn't find such a model yet.

Sparkle and Albatron

http://www.sparkle.com.tw

http://www.albatron.com.tw

http://www.albatron.com.tw/English/news/news_detail.asp?new=default&news_id=268

http://www.sparkle.com.tw/News/8400GSPCI/news_sp_8400GS_PCI_EN.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_9

...Google is your friend

[83bj]

Hi!

You write "The GeForce 8400GS is available in a PCI model for those wanting to use this low-end graphics card on say an Intel Atom system"

Does this model have another name? I couldn't find such a model yet.

I have an intel board with an integrated Atom Dualcore processor and I am planning on making a little multimediaserver. Unfortunately this board has only one standard pci slot.

Greetings

[sl1pkn07]

EDIT: Here is a better feature list of the GPU''s/IGP's

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_43029.html

what? 8600 playback VC-1? what core use 8600? not found info for this card (yes for old card, no for new card). is a new card release?

or this document is for windows playback...


sorry my english

[Yfrwlf]

I very much doubt that Dirac will replace much. Too much has been invested in making devices and standards revolving around those standards ranging from satellites to handheld devices. Dirac other then being open does not offer anything that already established codecs have brought to the table for quite some time now. If dirac was to become a standard, it would have had to come out in it's present form 5+ years ago.

Sure that would have been better, but the fact that it's completely open, unrestricted, and free in every way means it most likely will be adopted by most players for out of the box support, making it more common. It's supposed to be a better codec than the existing ones like H264 and such, so there's little reason not to use it, and if you want to stick with open source software you'll support it, and if developers are weary of law firms sending them royalty collection letters, they will care about supporting it as well. They did collect money on MP3s after all.

[npcomplete]

I very much doubt that Dirac will replace much. Too much has been invested in making devices and standards revolving around those standards ranging from satellites to handheld devices. Dirac other then being open does not offer anything that already established codecs have brought to the table for quite some time now. If dirac was to become a standard, it would have had to come out in it's present form 5+ years ago.

I think it has. Most people still relegate it to some kind of academic research project but it has been used in production at the BBC (their Olympic broadcast being the most well known example) and a growing number of places on the "backend". Dirac, like h.264 is suitable for the very low-end to the very high-end, much more so than h.264; but unlike h.264 it's also suitable as an intermediate codec with truly lossless and virtually lossless (after several re-encodings) options. Not many are aware of it's professional pedigree -- nor are they aware that it is used for VC-2. It's also planned to be supported for HTML5's video tag by Mozilla, which will hopefully bring it more towards the "frontend".

As far as hardware investment goes, this is what Numedia has to say:

Stuart Sommerville, managing director at Numedia Technology (Hampshire, the U.K.), described Dirac "very low complexity, simple to implement and it's readily adoptable." Numedia's DP 400, for example, uses only one FPGA, Xilinx' low power Virtex-5.

Further, Sommerville explained that Dirac Pro-based encoder/decoder makes a SD-to-full HD migration much lower cost and less painful for broadcasters. "Broadcast stations don't need to replace right away their already installed SDI-based studio equipment including routers, switchers and synchronizers."

coupled with the fact that

But the difference with Dirac is that "manufacturers don't have to pay us for the privilege of using Dirac," BBC said. "Nor, indeed, do they even have to ask us."

makes it very appealing to adopt it now especially since the Dirac and SMPTE VC-2 specs have been finalized.

http://www.videsignline.com/news/210601739

[greg]

1080p isn't too much for most graphic cards nor Linux, but for today's CPUs.

ffmpeg's terrible H.264 decoding performance (and lack of multi-threading support) doesn't help here either.