Based on my homemade ION box. Comparing Windows 7 (with DXVA2) vs XBMC Live.
dondre Wrote:- Which system gets the lowest CPU usage
Linux does, but mostly it is the RAM usage difference that is really noticeable. A XBMC Live machine can probably get by with 1GB of RAM, a Windows 7 machine certainly needs 2gb.
Quote:- Which system has the least frame drop (and graphical bug while jumping forward in a video)
- Which system has the most stable framerate
- Which system can cope the best with AVC/MPEG2/VC1 (without glitches)
Both Windows 7 and XBMC Live have really good video support.
In XBMC Live I can playback (perfectly mind you) the largest (and highest bitrate) media file I have ever seen- my Avatar Blu Ray rip.
I have gotten that file since I gave up on Windows 7, but at the time Windows was able to play the worst file I had then (a 18gb Transformers rips).
If you have an ION box and you are running either XBMC Live or the DXVA2 svn version of XBMC on Windows 7 and you get stuttering with standards compliant content, you are doing something wrong.
Personally I guess (even though I use Linux for my XBMC box) I would advice using Windows, as I get tired of seeing so many Linux newbs crash upon the XBMC Live beach when they want to do something the distro doesn't do out of the box and some command line work is needed...