2009-10-22, 20:46
The video is encoding in H.264 and transported via Adobe's RTMP protocol. On the IPlayer site the software which decodes the stream and renders the video is a flash plugin. XBMC uses it's own RTMP library to decode the stream and passes the H.264 video data to either it's own (ffmpeg) decoding library or via VDPAU to a NVIDIA GPU.
For hardware decoding there isn't any other option than Linux using the VDPAU api to a NVIDIA GPU. ATI doesn't have a working hardware decoding library under Linux and the windows version of XBMC doesn't yet support any form of hardware decode.
It is quite possible that the intel graphics are a large part of your problem from what I understand they are really very underpowered. The difference between Intel and NVidia graphics is shown in particular by the difference adding an NVidia ION makes to an Atom processor. Something like this. If you check under the Linux forum there is lots of info there on this type of platform.
Cheers
Dink
For hardware decoding there isn't any other option than Linux using the VDPAU api to a NVIDIA GPU. ATI doesn't have a working hardware decoding library under Linux and the windows version of XBMC doesn't yet support any form of hardware decode.
It is quite possible that the intel graphics are a large part of your problem from what I understand they are really very underpowered. The difference between Intel and NVidia graphics is shown in particular by the difference adding an NVidia ION makes to an Atom processor. Something like this. If you check under the Linux forum there is lots of info there on this type of platform.
Cheers
Dink
kasbah Wrote:The system is a pentium 4 with intel graphics (810 series). It manages to play the bbc hd streams fine with your plugin in XBMC. The same cannot be said for viewing in a browser on the iplayer webpage but i do not mind.
How does XBMC play the bbc streams? Are they in a flash format or h264? I am confused about this.
Wasn't and amd/ati backend for video decoding developed before VDPAU?
I will replace the system soon anyway as I cannot upgrade the graphics. It generally struggles in its current role. Any excessive movement on the screen that is not fullscreen video generally makes it sound like an airplane taking off. Sometimes it can't seem to cope with the XBMC menu graphics and crashes. I do still think there is something wrong with the skipping /seeking feature in iplayer plugin but the unstableness of the whole system overall makes it impossible to be sure of this.