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When I setup the HTPC I considered the i3 against a G620 Pentium and graphics card. The i3 may not have been the better choice for me because of the driver. There is no doubt the i3 has enough power.
A graphics card is worth a try. I'll let you know.
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Every first setup on a particular platform might be painful. I see no reason why the i3 with Intel graphics should not work. Ignore vdpau on Intel, this is only for NVidia. CPU load should not be that high if vaapi works. Have you installed vaapi? You can verify by installing and running vainfo.
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My thoughts, (blush)
"I tried Eden under Windows 7 (64-bit) on the same HTPC. The problem does not exist. Playback is very smooth with no jumps or hiccups"
So this is a software problem. Linux works best for me on nvidia vc.
"The bad news is that the i3 CPU does not have enough power to render blurays using the software method."
They make stand-alone BD players with cut-rate hw that work quite nicely. An i3 would eat them for breakfast easily. So this is sw prob again.
sk__, if you could boot off a different OS, another LiveCD, or older Dharma LiveCD and still have the skip prob, that would rule out sw at least.
---3 levels TS---
1. Hardware hw
2. Firmware fw
3. Software sw
out!
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I am not familiar with XBMCbuntu but I won't ever upgrade Ubuntu again. It takes at least as long as a clean installation and is likely to fail (at least it did fail several times on my systems in the past). I only do clean installations where I format the boot and the root partition of the disk and keep home. I prefer the 64bit version of Ubuntu. Installation is straight forward. What I do:
- In case I have no previous version installed I create a partition table: boot = 400MB, swap=2xRAM, root=15GB, home=remaining
- Install Ubuntu, select auto login
- After installation is finished and system has rebooted I log out of Unity and back in using Unity 2D (avoid using Unity or any other composition window manager)
- sudo apt-get purge pulsaudio* (if you have any good reasons for keeping PA do so)
- sodo apt-get purge libreoffice*
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get upgrade
- sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
- update/install xorg.conf
- update/install asound.conf
- you may need to install vaapi, vainfo and some other libs.
- ready to install XBMC
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2012-07-31, 20:53
(This post was last modified: 2012-07-31, 21:22 by dsrl.)
Thank you very much for your comments.
It has been many years since I did a Linux install. What I noticed about XBMCbuntu is that it installed very easily -- no missing driver problem like I had seen before -- so I expect a clean Ubuntu install will be much easier than what I remember.
You have been very kind to keep working with me so I do not want to trouble you with dumb questions but I have one. You said you prefer a 64-bit system. I did a very quick review of the Ubuntu site and they recommend 32-bit. Can you enlighten me a little on why you prefer 64-bit and speculate why Ubuntu recommends 32-bit?
EDIT: I did more poking around the Ubuntu site and found answers about the reason for their recommendation. I'll give 64-bit a try and fall back to 32-bit if necessary.