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-- Got a spare (crappy) PC... (http://www.vcdhq.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=82790)

Got a spare (crappy) PC...

I have an old PC that I never use and it seems like a waste. It's only got an Athlon XP 2400, 2gb of ram and an ATI X800xt gfx card in it, so it's pretty shit...

... I was just going to use it as a server/downloader doohickey but I was wondering if it's >just< powerful enough to be a media box for me. The thing is, I want it to playback HD (x264 mainly) and I doubt it can do that while running XP so I was wondering... Do I stand a chance of getting it to play HD smoothly if I say, put Linux or some dedicated media "thing" (if it exists) on it?

I was going to build a multimedia PC but if I can get this shitbox playing HD I'll suck your balls. Ta.

720 might play on that but 1080 will crush your CPU. No idea if the vid card will handle it as I just recently went ATI and was never up on the model/card names/numbers. Chances are that you are using pc 3200 (ddr 400) which again will bottleneck you a bit also. if it is ddr2 it should be fine memory wise.

yeah 720p mkv files will play on that no probs

i had a pentium 3 800mhz for streaming media through my old xbox and it handled 720p xvids.
(not that 720p xvids is anything to brag about.)
only had 512mb ram and on board graphics.
used it only up until 2 weeks ago.


maybe next time you should ask Neversoft

720p would be fine anyway cos my TV is shit anyway With regards to bottlenecks I was expecting XP to be the biggest, which is why I'm happy to ditch that if need be... If the PC simply doesn't have the grunt (the ram is PC3200) to play HD under any circumstances I'll sell it to somebody I don't like

http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-92172.html


so you should be sweet there man

http://fileshunt.com/?q=1080p%20720p%20mkv%20sample


some samples to download here to make sure.
save you from downloading larger files.

I think I'll try a massively stripped-down XP install first and maybe slap MediaPortal on and see how well it copes...

... I'm not expecting much but we'll see

Try and get hold of tinyXP and that should be enough + look at this guide if you want to use media portal. I thought it was pretty handy. Two other options are Mythbuntu or use XBMC for linux with Ubuntu.

I'm about to retire my xbmc xbox and using some spare pc bits laying about build a htpc.

How did you get on with this Neversoft ?
Have you had the time to set it up ?

Nah, been too busy to even look at it... I'm not even going home until Monday but I might try and have a bash next week

quote:

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Originally posted by Neversoft
I'm not even going home until Monday but I might try and have a bath next week

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quote:

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Originally posted by Neversoft
I might try and have a bash next week

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