Kodi Community Forum

Im not sure if my system should be able to cope or not here are the specs..

Ubuntu 9.04 Mini install
XBMC SVN (23185)
Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H Motherboard
Onboard 7100 nVidia with 256meg memory (shared)
2GB DDR2
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1
1TB HDD
Screen Res - 1920x1080
nVidia 185 Drivers

Running Aeon hitcher skin, all the interface works fine and 720p stuff but 1080p stuff skips frames and some 1080p films only play at 15fps

I know VDPAU mode isnt supported (Anyone know if Nvidia will be adding the 7xxx series to it?)

But should my machine not be fast enough to handle 1080p films in software? Is there anything I can try to improve the performance, I dont have anything extra running in the background the machine boots directly to XBMC

The 7 series doesn't have the ability to use vdpau if I'm not mistaken.
As far as playing 1080p stuff your video card is also the only problem I see, imho it's too weak for it.
But don't take my word as fact, just giving my opinion here. :p

A 2.1 C2D won't definitely play 1080p material if using software decoding (done by the cpu). If you have any slot available buy a (cheap) nvidia card that support vdpau and you're done.

I don't think they could add the feature to 7xxx because I think the problem is that the hardware architecture doesn't support it.

I have a Thinkpad T60 with a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo that plays back 1080p H.264 content without issue using software decoding. Off the top of my head I can't say what the top end is in terms of bit rate but I have no problems with any of my BD H.264 trasncodes (file sizes from 9GB-20GB). I'm obviously pushing the system to near it's limits and I cannot even run a full blown window manager like Gnome or it bogs down too much but a baseline XBMC live install with E17 as the window manager has served me well.

I did find something interesting with the system that might also trip you up. Thinking power management might be an issue if the clock changes I initially hopped into the BIOS and disabled it. This actually caused the system to run very sluggish and I assumed the system couldn't handle it but when I jumped on another Thinkpad T61 I have content played without issue. In the end leave power management on in the BIOS and set cpufreqd or whatever you use to always run the system at full speed and you should have some luck.