How Much Horsepower to Watch AVI?

[PowPow]

Just wondering what it takes to be able to watch video. Do I have enough, or what would I need? What about my situation could I improve?

I'd like to watch AVI videos (500MB each, let's say) that live on a USB drive.

I've got Puppy 2.13 running as live CD.

Computer is Gateway Solo 2500 laptop. 333hz processor. 64MB RAM. 2GB hard drive. I've got USB drives, and have fiddled with using a swap file from 20MB to 900 MB on USB.

When I watch video, it's pretty choppy (although I haven't gotten video to work with the 900 MB swap file for some reason).

What would help me? Buy more RAM? I think I can get another 64 or 128 for like $30.

Should I install to the hard drive? Would it be a significant difference? It has XP home on it currently and there's maybe 200 MB free...

Thank you!

[John Doe]

More RAM would help for out in general for sure.

My buddy has a thinkpad with about a 333 and I think he had 384megs of RAM. We were watching Full DVD's with puppy 2.14. AVI's should have rendered fine if DVD's would.

[sunburnt]

PowPow & John Doe; DVD's are mpeg2 video format, & ac3, aac, & other audio.
An AVI file can be one of many different video & many different audio formats.
A common one was known as Devx, which is a type of mpeg4 video format.
Newer M$ video formats are types of mpeg 4 also, & very propiatary of course.
So AVI's can be almost any type of video & audio stream = different cpus.

To play a mpeg2 DVD takes less cpu power than the more advanced mpeg4.
A 300mhz to 500mhz cpu should do mpeg2, a 800mhz to 1ghz cpu for mpeg4.
Some video bds. can help out a slower cpu, but the boost probably isn't much.
For Puppy & linuxes the Xorg video is needed to handle the video playback.

PowPow; Don't use a swap anything on a USB flash drive... it'll KILL IT !!!
Put the swap file or partition on the HD, it'll survive being accessed constantly.
The video will be MUCH better with a 150MB swap on the HD, USB is slooow.
Extra ram never hurts, but my movie PC has 64MB & plays DivX, why spend $ ?
Running from CD or HD just makes booting & apps. start faster, HD is better.

[GuestToo]

if you are using the Xvesa X server, your cpu is doing all the work when watching a movie ... Xvesa does not support 2d hardware acceleration ... the Xorg server does ... when you use the Xorg server, and watch movies using the xv driver instead of x11, the video card is doing most of the work

for a slow machine, you need to use the xv driver (or equivalent) which means you need to use the Xorg X server

the sound driver can also need a lot of cpu power ... you can try different sound drivers ... alsa, oss, asdl

see: http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/747/

[sunburnt]

GuestToo; I found the srticle informative, but I've noticed that slow storage is a problem.
CD, LAN, & USB flash can be too slow, increasing the buffer or cache size could help.
Even playing music could benefit from this, but especially movies of course.

Maybe Mplayer & Xine have the ability to do this, or a tweak to the Linux OS itself?

[GuestToo]

you can change the audio and video buffer size in gxine preferences, engine tab

mplayer has many options ... for example, you can start mplayer like this:

mplayer -channels 6 -quiet -vo xv -ao alsa:device=surround40 -cache 8192 "$@"

or sometimes the -nocache option is best

[paulsiu]

This following article has benchmark on a 500 Mhz processor a AMD Geode LX800 (which is based on the Athlon XP).

http://www.epiacenter.com/modules.php?n ... 101&page=9

According to the article, the 500 Mhz processor had no problems running Mpeg2, but maxed out trying to display Meg4. They switch software and manage playback at about 80% utilization.

From my experience on Knoppmyth on a 700 Mhz Athlon machine, the important factor is the video driver. If you don't have direct rendering on your video card, your playback is going to be choppy, so work on making sure you have the correct video driver and setting. Direct acceleration on my Voodoo card for example only works at 16-bit.

Paul

[John Doe]

According to the article, the 500 Mhz processor had no problems running Mpeg2, but maxed out trying to display Meg4. They switch software and manage playback at about 80% utilization.

I don't think it's as cut and dry as that, read this part:

With regards to MPEG-2/4 performance it again became obvious how much the choice of software can influence the user experience. With our standard choice of PowerDVD 6 our MPEG-2 video (a high-speed combat scene from "The Matrix") maxed out the CPU utilization at 100% while providing smooth playback during 90% of the scenes. Our MPEG-4 video consumed about 58% of the CPU cycles. However when using VLC (the favourite player of almost everyone here at EPIACENTER) the CPU utilization during the MPEG-2 test dropped to a more managable 88% with smooth playback 99% of the time. With the MPEG-4 sequence CPU utilization never went above 12%. Quite a difference I dare say!

And don't forget in the "real world" no one encodes avi's with the same size and bitrate as DVD's. I can play avi's on my phone if they are encoded slim enough. It has a 300mhz processor and 128megs RAM. I currently have two full length films on an SD card encoded with MP4 Video/Container and AAC Audio. The one is 1:56:26 and is only 278megs in size (I squash 'em good). They play back great. I don't think there is anyway my phone could render a PAL OR NTSC DVD MPEG2. It sometimes can't even handle mpegs off the internet.

[sunburnt]

As a measure of comparison, my AMD Semperon 2.4ghz will play a full
720x480 DevX with ac3 using only Xvesa, it runs around 80% cpu usage.
The video card's doing almost nothing & the cpu is running it's ass off.

[PowPow]

All, thanks for the ideas. I'll give some of these a shot and we'll see what happens.

Thanks again.

[John Doe]

As a measure of comparison, my AMD Semperon 2.4ghz will play a full
720x480 DevX with ac3 using only Xvesa, it runs around 80% cpu usage.
The video card's doing almost nothing & the cpu is running it's ass off.

Interesting.

I think the bottom line is that there are MANY factors that affect rendering video in Linux (and in general).

My first reply might have used too broad a brush.

[PowPow]

OK, making some progress. Please let me know if you have any ideas.

I've installed puppy to HD. There's a 120MB swap on the HD already (don't ask me how, perhaps an old Xubuntu attempt?).

The video is substantially better, but not great. Here are some details:
-The .AVI file is on a USB. I could put it on the HD if needed, but I'm lazy and would prefer not to. HD is quite small (2GB) so I'd be swapping out videos often.
-I fiddled with the gxine settings as GuestToo mentioned, but I don't know how much I should do. I doubled them (I think to 460 audio and 1000 video) and that seemed to help a little. Then I doubled again and that made it worse.
-I ordered 128 MB new RAM, will see how that does.

Questions:
-How much swap should I have (I've heard maybe 200MB if you've got 64MB RAM)? Is more better? Once I've got the extra 128MB RAM do I keep a swap file/partition?
-Would it help to have the .AVI file on the HD instead of on USB?

Thanks again!

[mouldy]

I found Ogle player to work best on older equipment. Early Puppy (0.9.x versions) even included it with a little frontend written by Barry. Even then dont expect miracles. Video card plays big role and old computers had minimal video cards. On a desktop, you can upgrade via added PCI card, but on a laptop, whats there is all there is or ever will be.