2012-11-17, 22:18
Hi
I bought a shuttle XH61V barebones a couple of weeks back which I thought would be the answer in my HTPC quest, but at the moment it doesn't seem to be that way.....
Installed in it I have:
A Celeron G530
4GB Ram
320gb Hard drive
Slot loading DVD
Running Windows 7 32 Bit, the machine boots really quick and the interface within XBMC runs great. For a 30 quid processor you can't complain.
All my content is stored on my Unraid server, in MKV format created using MakeMKV ripping DVD's and Blurays.
Now all DVD content and 720 MKV's play back fine it's only when I start playing back Blu ray rips that I run in to trouble.
I'm running v.11 Eden rev 13 downloaded from pulse eight site to get the CEC adapter working.
I know that the onboard GPU doesn't play nicely with XBMC so the Render method is set to software to use the CPU, DXVA2 is disabled and i'm using the full screen window, as many people have suggested and had success with on here. I have updated to the latest Intel drivers, (web scan confirms this), disabled UAC in windows but I'm still having trouble. Deinterlacing is set to auto in all 3 options.
I've been testing with 3 films all MKV all ripped with the same default settings in Make MKV.
Monsters inc, Crash and One day.
Monsters inc and Crash are h264, One day is VC1. I've not heard of this before. Can anyone enlighten?
Now Monsters Inc seems to working fine, CPU is sitting around 60%. Weirdly core 0 at around 50% and core 1 at 90% but it works no frame rate drops or artifacts.
When I play Crash and One day, which seem to be higher bit rate films I get a lot of stuttering and frame drops, I can see the skipped frames when pressing o to bring up the info.
If...
I then switch to software render and DXVA2 enabled, Crash then plays fine, CPU is at 15% or so, assuming it's then using the GPU here. If I then use these settings to play monsters inc I don't get frame drops instead lots of artifacts. Playing back One day I've used numerous combinations of software/DXVA/DXVA 2 etc and they all suffer from frame drops and stuttering. Some worse than others. On another note I tried Monsters inc in VLC and with GPU hardware acceleration lots of artifacts as it did in XBMC, Using the CPU it played back fine. Both CPU and GPU acceleration in VLC worked on the other two films.
I have another XBMC pc in another room which is a core 2 duo e6300 and a dedicated ATI 54?? something (cheap £30 GPU) which plays back brilliantly using DXVA using the same films.
So will it be possible to get this working using my current setup or have I bought a dud?
Would upgrading the the CPU to an i3 help at all?
The board has a single PCE x1 slot and I have an Broadcom crystal decoder (15) which I used to use with an ATV 1, using an adapter I could physically fit this in and shift the decoding to this.... thoughts?
Or do I stick it on ebay?
Cheers guys
http://pastebin.com/b3fAUKeE Log file found here. It contains the logs where I switched between the settings and films etc
I bought a shuttle XH61V barebones a couple of weeks back which I thought would be the answer in my HTPC quest, but at the moment it doesn't seem to be that way.....
Installed in it I have:
A Celeron G530
4GB Ram
320gb Hard drive
Slot loading DVD
Running Windows 7 32 Bit, the machine boots really quick and the interface within XBMC runs great. For a 30 quid processor you can't complain.
All my content is stored on my Unraid server, in MKV format created using MakeMKV ripping DVD's and Blurays.
Now all DVD content and 720 MKV's play back fine it's only when I start playing back Blu ray rips that I run in to trouble.
I'm running v.11 Eden rev 13 downloaded from pulse eight site to get the CEC adapter working.
I know that the onboard GPU doesn't play nicely with XBMC so the Render method is set to software to use the CPU, DXVA2 is disabled and i'm using the full screen window, as many people have suggested and had success with on here. I have updated to the latest Intel drivers, (web scan confirms this), disabled UAC in windows but I'm still having trouble. Deinterlacing is set to auto in all 3 options.
I've been testing with 3 films all MKV all ripped with the same default settings in Make MKV.
Monsters inc, Crash and One day.
Monsters inc and Crash are h264, One day is VC1. I've not heard of this before. Can anyone enlighten?
Now Monsters Inc seems to working fine, CPU is sitting around 60%. Weirdly core 0 at around 50% and core 1 at 90% but it works no frame rate drops or artifacts.
When I play Crash and One day, which seem to be higher bit rate films I get a lot of stuttering and frame drops, I can see the skipped frames when pressing o to bring up the info.
If...
I then switch to software render and DXVA2 enabled, Crash then plays fine, CPU is at 15% or so, assuming it's then using the GPU here. If I then use these settings to play monsters inc I don't get frame drops instead lots of artifacts. Playing back One day I've used numerous combinations of software/DXVA/DXVA 2 etc and they all suffer from frame drops and stuttering. Some worse than others. On another note I tried Monsters inc in VLC and with GPU hardware acceleration lots of artifacts as it did in XBMC, Using the CPU it played back fine. Both CPU and GPU acceleration in VLC worked on the other two films.
I have another XBMC pc in another room which is a core 2 duo e6300 and a dedicated ATI 54?? something (cheap £30 GPU) which plays back brilliantly using DXVA using the same films.
So will it be possible to get this working using my current setup or have I bought a dud?
Would upgrading the the CPU to an i3 help at all?
The board has a single PCE x1 slot and I have an Broadcom crystal decoder (15) which I used to use with an ATV 1, using an adapter I could physically fit this in and shift the decoding to this.... thoughts?
Or do I stick it on ebay?
Cheers guys
http://pastebin.com/b3fAUKeE Log file found here. It contains the logs where I switched between the settings and films etc
