On 17 Aug 2010, at 15:08, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
...
The clips do not play in any reasonable form. I get moments of
sound, and a few pixels changing on screen; nothing coherent. I'd
been told that H264 needs a lot of CPU and I guess an old 4-core 32-
bit XEON (effectively 800 MHz each) on 2 GB ECC DDR1 is not enough.
Okay.
Hi-def needs a lot of horses to play, I'm not sure about H264 compared
to other codecs. H264 is designed so that specialised deciding chips
(in mobile phones and set-top-boxes) can be built cheaply to aid
playback, but on generic hardware I would imagine it would be a chunk
more demanding than (say) the MPEG2 of the DVD standard written over a
decade ago.
If you mean 4 *processors* at 800mhz, then that's Pentium III
territory, and you have no chance. You'd really be requiring a Core2
class machine. A Pentium 4 is likely to struggle.
Video playback does parallelise, if the player is written for that.
But 800mhz is still massively underpowered for hi-def video.
Stroller.
