2014-08-15, 06:37
A local business owner gave me an old Dell Optiplex gx620 that was used previously in a business office, and I was hoping to repurpose it to use as an xbmc htpc in my bedroom.
Relevant info on the machine:
Pentium 4
3 GB Ram
Windows XP
400 GB HDD
In addition, I had an old geforce 210 video card lying around that I have installed in a PCI slot - though I gotta say, I am a noob at installing hardware. I downloaded drivers from nvidia's site for the video card and connected the video card to an hdtv via hdmi. Picture and audio in windows and xbmc work, with the exception of 1080p.
I installed xbmc 12.3 (since that is the version I currently have on my other machines and am familiar with) and added folders from my living room i3 htpc as sources for tv and movies. That seemed to work fine for the most part, though episodes of at least one show aren't showing up. On to my real hardware concerns.
Playback of SD content and 720p content seems to be working fine, yet playback of 1080p content (basically no matter what the bitrate) stutters and shows a ton of dropped frames when I push "o" during playback - like to the tune of hundreds per minute I'd say. If I pause the video for several seconds and then push play it plays fine for a few seconds before it begins to stutter and drop frames again.
I thought maybe this was an issue of delivery of the video over the network being bad. My i3 htpc hosting the files is connected via cat6 to a gigabit powerline adapter, as is my router. The optiplex is then connected via cat6 to my router. The interesting thing is that the same files playback fine on a Roku 3 that I have connected via cat6 to another powerline adapter when played in Plex using the direct play option (which I understand to mean no transcoding), which seems to suggest that the network is not the problem. Also, I downloaded some high bitrate 1080p video samples (like the bird file and a couple others) to the optiplex and they stutter really badly when played in vlc player.
So my question, do you think this is a problem with network limitation / bottleneck or one with the hardware of the optiplex? If the latter, what component is holding it back from handling 1080p videos? Or is it some limitation of windows xp? I had read xp causes problems with, or prevents, hardware acceleration / gpu decoding. Will giving some variant of Linux a try be better?
Any ideas or tips to help me troubleshoot?
Relevant info on the machine:
Pentium 4
3 GB Ram
Windows XP
400 GB HDD
In addition, I had an old geforce 210 video card lying around that I have installed in a PCI slot - though I gotta say, I am a noob at installing hardware. I downloaded drivers from nvidia's site for the video card and connected the video card to an hdtv via hdmi. Picture and audio in windows and xbmc work, with the exception of 1080p.
I installed xbmc 12.3 (since that is the version I currently have on my other machines and am familiar with) and added folders from my living room i3 htpc as sources for tv and movies. That seemed to work fine for the most part, though episodes of at least one show aren't showing up. On to my real hardware concerns.
Playback of SD content and 720p content seems to be working fine, yet playback of 1080p content (basically no matter what the bitrate) stutters and shows a ton of dropped frames when I push "o" during playback - like to the tune of hundreds per minute I'd say. If I pause the video for several seconds and then push play it plays fine for a few seconds before it begins to stutter and drop frames again.
I thought maybe this was an issue of delivery of the video over the network being bad. My i3 htpc hosting the files is connected via cat6 to a gigabit powerline adapter, as is my router. The optiplex is then connected via cat6 to my router. The interesting thing is that the same files playback fine on a Roku 3 that I have connected via cat6 to another powerline adapter when played in Plex using the direct play option (which I understand to mean no transcoding), which seems to suggest that the network is not the problem. Also, I downloaded some high bitrate 1080p video samples (like the bird file and a couple others) to the optiplex and they stutter really badly when played in vlc player.
So my question, do you think this is a problem with network limitation / bottleneck or one with the hardware of the optiplex? If the latter, what component is holding it back from handling 1080p videos? Or is it some limitation of windows xp? I had read xp causes problems with, or prevents, hardware acceleration / gpu decoding. Will giving some variant of Linux a try be better?
Any ideas or tips to help me troubleshoot?