Hardware for Linux and XBMC

rodalpho Wrote:My understanding is that the SVN (not-official) releases of both mplayer and ffmpeg can indeed play the EVO files once decrypted but no, I haven't tried it.

Now THAT is good news! I've not tried building either of those from SVN but I remember one of the mPlayer devs sounding a bit snippy when I was looking for software to play this. As I recall their canned response when asked about HD support was something like "we'll get to it, stop asking":laugh: The ffmpeg code I had could apparently read it but decoding the audio seems to be an issue. I think the code I used had EAC code written for one of Google's Code Summer things and I found more than one person complaining about the static when using it to transcode. I know XBMC isn't using mPlayer but I *think* the ffmpeg code is a help so my fingers are crossed that eventually we'll get it in XBMC but I'll understand if it's not there tomorrow I'm trying to compile ffmpeg from SVN now, we'll see how it goes, I'll try mPlayer too while I'm being adventurous - at least I'd be more sure what to do with it! I appreciate the info on these packages...

P.S. please don't feel like I was jumping you on this, to say I'm frustrated with the situation is an understatement and I hope I didn't sound like I was taking it out on you

According to this page it even worked back in feisty. But again, I haven't tried it.

rodalpho Wrote:According to this page it even worked back in feisty. But again, I haven't tried it.

Funny, I was all over that page trying to get the ODF2.5 drivers to work, duh! So far though no playback even with this SVN mPlayer. CODEC issues for audio and no video so far... <shrug>

Hi guys!

I wanted to ask if there are any new informations on a "need to know"-basis refering to a recommended hardware?

I'm using the XBMC on my Xbox and I'm happy with it. Well... quite happy despite the fact that I can't run my HD-material.

Sooo... what hw should be used for the "usual" material (x264/vc1) with a maximum of ~15000kbps in bitrate?

I would be really, REALLY thankful if you could share your experience with me!

PS: Sorry for me bad english... it has been a very long time since im out of school... I hope it's understandable...

There is no officially recommended minimum yet. I'd personally recommend:

CPU: 2.2ghz C2D
Video: any nvidia that supports opengl 2.0
RAM: 1GB
OS: ubuntu 7.10 32-bit
Remote: MS MCE

Thy for the quick response.

Is it correct that XBMC-Linux don't benefit from any kind auf GPU despite the onboard-chipsets?

Yes, correct. If your GPU supports opengl 2.0, it'll run just as fast as an 8800 ultra.

For very demanding materials (read: "birds scene" ) 2.6GHz is minimum and that's with very efficient CoreAVC codec. If You go for socket 775 Dual Core Intel, than 2.2 or 2.6 doesn't make any difference as You buy lowest clocked one and OC it to 2,6-3,0GHz with no problems (except You must have good motherboard)

XBMC somehow benefit not low end graphics in some cases because it was already reported that for example integrated GF 7050 was bottleneck and as I read recently, also 7150 sometimes happen to be to less.

rodalpho, that's not entirely accurate, you will definitely benefit from a better GPU. For example, the Nvidia 7050, even though it supports OpenGL 2.1, cannot (currently) handle the bicubic video upsampling filter, whereas the Nvidia 7600 can.

When you talk about the bird-scene, which bitrate does it have?

My material is mostly 720p/9000kbps.

I'm planning to buy these things:

Motherboard
Intel Core2Duo 2,2ghz
1gb Ram (DDR800)
Case

Good choice or a "no go!"? :confused2: