2012-08-03, 17:16
Everyone and their grandmother has a story to tell about how well XBMC runs on the latest/greatest hardware. I thought I'd do the opposite--and related how well it runs on the oldest/crappiest hardware--if only to give hope to those like myself who are of (clears throat) limited means. I had an old Dell Dimension 2400 desktop lying around that I had bought a few years earlier from Goodwill here in Austin. At the time it was certainly an OK system but it only had half a meg of memory and really crappy on-board Intel graphics and so I later added a gig of RAM and a PCI graphics card (yeah, I know AGP would've been better, but it didn't even have an AGP slot). So here's the overall specs:
Dell Dimension 2400
2.4ghz P4
1.5 gbytes memory
Nvidia Geforce 8400 GS "Verto" PCI graphics w/512 mbytes memory
For connecting to the network, I used a NetGear WNCE2001 "universal wireless internet adapter", (which I highly recommend to anyone running a Linux-based O/S given the O/S sees it as just an ethernet connection and hence there's less configuration issues). BTW, I found that the NetGear adapter for some reason wouldn't work with our Motorola DSL modem and so I had to connect a NetGear N150 (WNR1000) 10/100 router to the modem and connect to it instead...
Considering the modest hardware involved, the results are rather amazing. The system streams both standard definition and 720 HD videos smooth as silk off the internet. I'm not sure whether it can stream 1080 HD videos although it seems like I had done this. It streams well off my network as well although I haven't tried streaming any HD videos off of the network yet. Overall, I'm quite pleased with the outcome. I thought I'd post this because these old Dells can probably be had for less than $50 and I much prefer XBMC over most "off-the-shelf" boxes like Roku because I can temporarily use this system for other purposes just by booting into a Linux Live-CD if I want to run something special purpose like Audacity, Firefox, Open Office or perhaps even Blender... You can't do that on a Roku.
In closing, I'd to thank the XBMC team for their monumental efforts. XBMC is a fine piece of software.
Dell Dimension 2400
2.4ghz P4
1.5 gbytes memory
Nvidia Geforce 8400 GS "Verto" PCI graphics w/512 mbytes memory
For connecting to the network, I used a NetGear WNCE2001 "universal wireless internet adapter", (which I highly recommend to anyone running a Linux-based O/S given the O/S sees it as just an ethernet connection and hence there's less configuration issues). BTW, I found that the NetGear adapter for some reason wouldn't work with our Motorola DSL modem and so I had to connect a NetGear N150 (WNR1000) 10/100 router to the modem and connect to it instead...
Considering the modest hardware involved, the results are rather amazing. The system streams both standard definition and 720 HD videos smooth as silk off the internet. I'm not sure whether it can stream 1080 HD videos although it seems like I had done this. It streams well off my network as well although I haven't tried streaming any HD videos off of the network yet. Overall, I'm quite pleased with the outcome. I thought I'd post this because these old Dells can probably be had for less than $50 and I much prefer XBMC over most "off-the-shelf" boxes like Roku because I can temporarily use this system for other purposes just by booting into a Linux Live-CD if I want to run something special purpose like Audacity, Firefox, Open Office or perhaps even Blender... You can't do that on a Roku.
In closing, I'd to thank the XBMC team for their monumental efforts. XBMC is a fine piece of software.