Hardware requirements for XBMC+VDR with VDPAU?
#1
Hello all,

first of all, thanks for this great piece of software. I started to look into XBMC a little bit longer now, and I got subscribed to this forum here now. :-)


Ok, here are my starter questions:
1) What is the minimum hardware requirement for the XBMC to run smoothly?

2) Can the VDPAU branch upload its GUI rendering to the graphics core as well or is a remaining task to the CPU?


I'm wondering if I could insert a passively cooled Nvidia GFX cards into a plain old Pentium 2 board and do some nearly fan-less system setup.


So, how much (or better how less) Watts do your systems burn typically?



Regards,
Marcus
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#2
Right now, I'd suggest a PCIe 9500GT as being about the best 'bang per buck' out there. You can get passive 9500's too. Regarding the P2 thing... damn - thats pretty old! If it has a PCIe x16 slot it would *probably* work.

The rest of the rendering has always been OpenGL, which is of course hardware accelerated.

I'm running a few systems, the most efficient of which plays back 1080p at around 70 watts. Others have run xbmc-vdpau on Intel Atoms at significantly less.
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#3
Ok, I found the Asus P5N7A-VM Mainboard with Geforce 9300, which should run fine.
I gonna run that with a Intel Celeron S-430, this seems to be a good compromise for some performance margin for MP3 encoding or so.


You're right, P2 is really old, but I have one here. :-)
I saw a regular PCI based VDPAU card somewhere these days. Eventually, I give this a try in this old mainboard before I spend more for the final configuration.


Thanks!
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#4
On SD content XBMC-VDPAU with VDR patch doesnt seem to use VDPAU acceleration.
Asus P5N7A-VM|Win7 32bit|Intel C2D E8400|2GB|integrated nVidia 9300-HDMI|Integrated Audio-Optical SPDIF| 50" plasma 3DTV (Samsung PS50C7705)
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#5
Hmm, ist this only not implemented yet or even not planed to be working ever?

I've read the Nvidia announcement of VPDAU, and I did not see a limitation for HD content only. So, this confuses me right now.


Ok, my plan is:
- silent and efficient HTPC
- with a fancy frontend
- for MP3, DVD, Images and TV + PVR
- TV, PVR is based on a DVB-T card


Hardware setup will be something like this:
7.1 speaker system <-- Denon 4306 receiver <--(optical cable)-- XBMC --(720p or 1080i HDMI)--> Toshiba 37" LCD TV


So, is VDPAU not the right approach for this?
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#6
The first Google result for VDPAU tells you that VDPAU is a spec for GPU accelerated play back of "MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.264, and VC-1 bitstreams." That means it will work for most (if not all) HD formats and SD, as long as it's MPEG. VDPAU should work fine for DVB-T.
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#7
Great. This means that I understood it correctly.
Thanks for the clarification.

Have a good night! Wink
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Hardware requirements for XBMC+VDR with VDPAU?0