[bzajac]

I am running XBMC Live from a high speed USB device (+40 Mbps read). Media is stored on my NAS or a USB HDD. Everything works great when playing SD files. When I go to 720p MKV files, my CPU never goes over 50% load but I drop hundreds of frames. My hardware consists of an Intel D945GCLF2 dual core atom processor (1.6 ghz each), Intel GMA 950, and 2 GB RAM. I know the hardware is light on horsepower but I have read numerous posts and reviews that show this system can handle 720p content. I have vsync off and upscaling disabled. Any advice?

[bitflusher]

the never above 50% cpu usage is due to hyperthreading, this splits each physical core into two virtual cores. since xbmc jsut uses 2 cores (read it somewhere here on this forum) it xbmc selects the first two virtual cores it just uses the first physical cpu (dont know it this really happnes).

for me disabling hyperthreading in the bios thus showing only two cores works for me.

p.s. i run a windows xp sp2 install, not optimized (*yet) for anything and playing stargate atlantis, it drops 41 in the first second and 20 more in the 20 seconds after, then it plays well. between 65% in calm scenes and maxing out at 85% in some active scenes.

edit: trying svn builds, i found one that just dropped 13 in the first seconds

[althekiller]

It's more likely that the memory bus is saturated. Pick up a cheap nvidia card and you'll be in business (yes there's a pci version of the 8400, davilla has one).

[bitflusher]

perhaps he could try a free and quick bios setting instead of rushing to the stores spending money...

for me it worked, i got my replacement for my old xbox, i am glad xbmc was ported and didn't die a slow death.

[davilla]

Couple of things,

1) There's an Intel update for the D945GCLF2 bios.

2) The D945GCLF2 is a dual-core but XBMC Live will actually see 4 as hyper-threading is enabled. Mine works fine with hyper-threading only, so good that I did not fiddle with it. XBMC uses more than two "cores", it's the threads than matter not the cores. ffmpeg can only use two "cores" but only if the content is encoded properly.

3) +40 Mbps read, must be mega bits as you can't get 40 mega bytes per second over USB. 35-37 maybe but not 40. My best USB flash drive is 14 MB per second, USB HDs are faster but not by much. If you are really getting 40+ mega bits per second, that's pretty slow, 100T ethernet is faster.

4) I've tried many 720p MKV, they all play fine without stutters/drops. This is also with the native chipset GPU. On USB flash drives and over the network.

5) Pretty crappy chipset fan, I replaced mine

"ifconfig" to check for network errors, "dmesg" to check logs, Linux must have something like MediaInfo to qualify your MKV files. MKV is a container, the video content inside can be very different from on MKV to another.

And with a PCI based 8400 nvidia card and the new VDPAU driver and patched mplayer, pretty much all 720p content that I have is about 3-5 percent CPU. That's pretty cool.