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Zenith
Junior Member
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Very Nice!
Do you think that g530 has enough cpu power too for hd playback or is better to stay on the safe side of G620?
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2012-06-24, 04:19
(This post was last modified: 2012-06-24, 04:43 by DJ_Izumi.)
You all talk about this as if decoding High Profile 1080p h.264 content on a CPU is actually some sort f computational feat in the year 2012. It's not guys. Frankly, even dual core Netbook/Nettop hardware could do the job in XBMC if they were to actually get multi-core support in their ffmpeg implimentation working. So right now, any of those machines can only use ONE physical core to do the job and that's why they come up short.
And since you're limited to a single core for the ffmpeg thread, it cuts the difference between the CPUs pretty sharply since the fact that they have multiple cores is kinda moot, so long as there's at least ONE other core to handle audio and subitles and the like, while the first core is free to simply decode video.
For the sake of arguement, I'm running Beta 2 of Frodo on my laptop right now, it's an i7-2630QM and it's dropped 8 frames in Beauty And The Beast just trying to play back the opening bumpers. It's dropping very, very, very few frames, as I type this it's only at 10 frames dropped going through the first scene but it's happening. Why is a powerful, high end i7 Sandy Bridge CPU dropping frames? Beause while it's a quad core, it only has 2.0ghz available for a single core and that's not a whooooole lot. I upgraded this laptop, it used to have an i5 2410m (dual core, 2.3ghz) before I swapped out the CPU to give it more power. (I use it as a video editing laptop mainly). That 'inferior' dualcore CPU is superior in this task because 2.3ghz wins out against 2.0ghz since 2 or 4 cores is irrelevent to XBMC.
But the issue of h.264 decoding on the CPU isn't much about the CPU unless you're way at the bottom line of CPUs. It's that XBMC's lack of multicore video decoding makes XBMC very inefficent at it's primary task.
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How were you guys able to get the G530 to bitsream DTS-HD/TrueHD? I have one in my XBMC 12.2 build and when I turn on those audio outputs the video starts stuttering like crazy. I'm actually using a Radeon HD 6450 for all video processing directly to the TV and the G530 for audio directly to a receiver via HDMI (All works and plays fine until I turn on either of the HD audio settings in XBMC).
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I got it working! I had old microsoft drivers installed instead of the intel ones for the audio. Once I installed that, DTS-HD and TrueHD showed up under supported modes. No more stuttering in XBMC. I can confirm the G530 does work for bitstreaming.