h264 on Sempron 2800

donutface

Hi there,

Im currently using a Sempron64 2800 running Windows Vista Ultimate with 1gb of ram and a fairly old (Geforce 5200) graphics card.

I managed to get my hands on a h264 rip of the Matrix in 1080p however the sound is off sync and video is fairly choppy. I have it hooked up to a 720p TV so the screen resolution is 1366x768

I was just wondering is it slow because of a bad processor or bad graphics card? Would I need special codecs to take care of hardware acceleration in those h264 graphics cards or do the majority of them support it by default?

Thanks,
Paul

SouperComputer

The CPU is too weak to carry a slow GPU and the GPU is too slow to carry a weak CPU.

Get you hands on an AGP card (assuming the board is AGP and not PCI Express) with DXVA and you should be able to play the vid quite well.

Also, the drivers for the FX5200 on Vista are absolute pants. I have a couple of 1.8Ghz P4's with XP Pro and FX5200 that can play 720P content fairly well.

Irishpimpdude

Yea u should really revert to xppro vista wont do any justice with your system

donutface

I plan on going to Linux (gentoo) soon, I just had vista as it was the only license i had lying around.

What I'll do is install linux and see first if it makes any difference, then buy a decent card

Thanks,
Paul.

SouperComputer

donutface wrote: »

I plan on going to Linux (gentoo) soon, I just had vista as it was the only license i had lying around.

What I'll do is install linux and see first if it makes any difference, then buy a decent card

Thanks,
Paul.

You should see an improvement, but im not sure if it will be smooth. I had a similar setup (P4 3.0Ghz/512MB/FX5200) on MythTV playing 1080i MPEG2 TS without breaking a sweat. x264 is another kettle of fish though.

MediaTank

The movie may have been encoded at too high a spec. Download MediaInfo (free) and poin it at the file. If it reports profile 5.0 or higher then it is very high spec.and will need serious hardware to play back smoothly.