My HTPCs are dropping frames when playing 720p mkv files. HTPC1: AMD LE1660 2.8GHz Lima CPU, Biostar K8M800 motherboard, 2x1GB Kingston DDR2-667 RAM, 1TB Barracuda HDD, ATi 8500 video card HTPC2: Same as 1 but a 500GB Barracuda HDD and an ATi 9700 Pro video card Do the video cards have anything to do with playback performance?
The bottleneck when watching HD video on your computer is the data transmission from its stored location into ram for playback. I doubt your video hardware is having trouble rendering the image, if your player even supports Directx overlays... its likely you do not have enough available memory to keep a large enough cache and so the program has to pull the data from the harddrive in real time, and no hard drive in the world can handle that type of throughput, save for maybe ultra expensive solid state drives.
probably CPU I only have a cheapo 2gb ram kit and it plays 1080p fine.. and video cards wont make a diff it's only 2d
I thought mkv was uncompressed? CPU would only come into play if the software is decompressing in real time or something like that I would think... you might be right though, but even then I would think a 2.8ghz chip would handle 720p And about the video card thing, a lot of media players render via a directx overlay to take advantage of hardware acceleration
decoding HD content needs a lot of processing power. it will stress even the modern CPUs. check your CPU load while watching. now,... ATI has this thing called AVIVO HD. Nvidia calls theirs PureVideo HD. having these will offload decoding jobs to the vid card to help the CPU. I don't think your cards have this. without it, paired with a single core cpu = fail and then there's codecs and the player you use.
Ah, didnt know that. I also didn't know that 720p would require more than a 3ghz processor I mean, 1280x720 is much lower res than most computer monitors are capable of... and I can only imagine that simply dumping predefined video to it would be a lot less difficult than generating the image from meta-data (as in gaming) in a much higher resolution (1600x1200 and higher for most games). I guess its all about the decompression that has to take place
Ya I was about to say that CPU is easily powerful enough and the 8500 does do hardware h.264 decoding.
Just tested a 720p video on a dual core 1.6GHz Atom, and it played absolutely fine with only a 70% CPU load So CPU's are almost never the issue.
CoreAVC is pretty badass...hopefully they include hardware decoding at some point then it will be unbeatable.
that's not what I said. HD playback is indeed CPU intensive, but if you do have sw/hw decoding assistance,.... CPU won't matter much. that's why I asked him to check the cpu, vid cards, codecs & player.
Or just get Core Media Player, http://www.corecoded.com/ It's free. Solved my problem with playing HD content. All the other media players had issues playing the Matroska container.