[shanea1967]

Am I right when I say that the quality of your picture when streaming movies / tv programs from the internet is dependent on the speed of your internet and not the processor speed or graphics card.

What i'm trying to ask is, if my internet speed is crap, then building a high performance pc is not going to help with the internet streaming quality of picture on xbmc

thanks in advance

[nickr]

You are right.

[artrafael]

It also depends on the quality of the streams provided by the various sites (especially when it comes to piracy sites). So, either way, a higher performance system would not necessarily translate into higher quality videos.

[DJ_Izumi]

Lower end CPUs are only able to decode video in black and white. :O

[nickr]

Lower end CPUs are only able to decode video in black and white. :O

And without audio, so they're really only good for silent movies. But if you have a piano it'll all work out.

[artrafael]

And the video playback will be very jerky and the picture quality grainy. The good news is that subtitles (or, rather, intertitles) work really well.

[Piers]

There's little point in building a powerful box if it's only - or mostly - going to be used for streaming. Also there's very little need for a super powerful box purely for XBMC. My HTPC is low spec, but it plays 1080p content (mostly - F*ck you Lenovo) without an issue.

[edrikk]

I don't think your answer is black-and-white.

Pretty much everything can decode h264 in h/w (also not black and white / has exceptions). With that said, it depends on how / where you stream from. What do you mean by stream?
Youtube? yes.
Netflix? yes.
An mp4 file being played while downloaded? No. Your experience will depend on your bandwidth, but in terms of how much buffering.

So it depends on the source, what it is streaming, how it is streaming it, how it's coded (i.e. will it notice low bandwidth and adjust), etc.

In XMBC? Above also applies...