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[gundan]

Hello All,

I used to be a JRiver user(ver 10 or so I think, I upgraded to 11 but never used much of it).  I further moved to the Mac and have been a happy mac os x user.

My company is getting rid of a few hundred slim factor dell p4 2.8 ghz machines, and it looks I have my pick of any of the machines to take home.  I am planning to set up a HTPC connecting to my tv(it has a vga port displaying at 1920x1080).  My goal is to primarily play x264 hd content with dd 5.1/dts content. 

That being said I have to decide on an OS etc.  What is the difference between using Windows XP Media Center Edition/Vista Home Premium/JRiver on XP Pro?  What are the pros/cons? 

I have purchased a Microsoft MCE remote, does that mate with JRiver?  Can JRiver run fine on XP MCE?  I don't mind upgrading to JRiver MC 12, but want to know what I do get.

Thanks,
G

[newsposter]

as a side issue, you're going to want to invest in a decent video card.  That Dell on-board stuff shares main system memory.  Additionally, the analog VGA output will be less than ideal for a clear HD picture.

A suitable video card will be less than U$100-.  Probably well less.  Don't have to spend a lot, just get a card with a reasonably fast GPU, 256+ Mb of on-board memory, and a DVI and/or HDMI port.

Even if that hand-me-down Dell system 'only' has an AGP slot just about any AGP card you can find will be better than the on-board video.  On-board video isn't automatically bad, but in the case of the Dell SFF boxes it's designed for low-cost use in a business environment, not as a media-capable PC.

Vista carries a lot of negative baggage with it, much deserved, some not.  The problems with Vista are generally in the areas of video card horsepower, driver stability, security features, and the new address space randomization feature.  Sure, you can manually turn off all of that stuff but XP is a proven product.  Vista still has a lot to prove even with SP1 release a few weeks away.

XP otoh is a well understood target platform with loads of support from software and hardware makers.

[Doof]

You can read this thread that I started a while back about making a similar decision.

The short of it is... MC will give you more flexibility in how to browse your music. MCE kind of limits you to only their view schemes. You can't decide to browse your music by bitrate if you wanted to, for instance. You can in MC.

Also, at least in Vista's MCE, you can only browse pictures and videos by their folder location. In MC, you can browse them by anything you want.

And based on my experiences with using MC on a Vista box using an MCE remote, MC will respond to the remote commands out of the box. I may still wind up installing girder, just to get more use out of the remote, but for general Theater View use, it works great.

[glynor]

A suitable video card will be less than U$100-.  Probably well less.  Don't have to spend a lot, just get a card with a reasonably fast GPU, 256+ Mb of on-board memory, and a DVI and/or HDMI port.

Even if that hand-me-down Dell system 'only' has an AGP slot just about any AGP card you can find will be better than the on-board video.  On-board video isn't automatically bad, but in the case of the Dell SFF boxes it's designed for low-cost use in a business environment, not as a media-capable PC.

Hmmm.... I strongly disagree.  An old P4 2.8 GHz is going to seriously drop frames with 1080p H264 compressed footage, unless you invest in a good video card that can handle the H264 compression.  VC1 and MPEG-2 compression are far less demanding, and the P4 should be able to handle those just fine.

However, even my dual-core Opteron 170 @ 2.6Ghz drops a frame here and there on 1080p H264 video, unless I enable the hardware acceleration on my X1900XT card.  From the testing I've seen, the same is true of many of the lower-end current Core2 CPUs out there, much less the old Netburst CPUs.

Probably your best bet will be to wait until the HD 3850 AGP cards become available (Sapphire and PowerColor will release them, probably early next year if not this month) and go with one of those.  That should run around $200-$220 (the PCIe versions are about $179).  There also are AGP X1950 Pro cards currently available, which include less-robust H264 acceleration if you need it now, but the acceleration in the 3850 is much better and I'd wait for it (the acceleration on the older card might not handle all content on that slower CPU).  I don't know if there are any HD 2600 cards available for AGP computers.  If so, I'd stick with a Sapphire brand card, as the HIS and PowerColor ones have some well-documented driver issues.

If you love Nvidia instead, then the 8x00 line of cards also includes hardware acceleration for H264 compressed video.  Their hardware isn't quite as advanced (video decoding wise -- it is better for 3D applications), and they only accelerate H264, leaving off many of the features for VC1 encoded video.  As I said before though, VC1 is far less demanding and the CPU can probably handle it alone.  The big issue with Nvidia is the quality of their Vista drivers.  If you go Nvidia, I'd leave Vista alone for now.  They are slowly fixing their 3D issues with their Vista drivers, but their video-quality still has a LONG way to go.

Here's a good article from this past summer: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3047  It doesn't include the HD 3850 cards (which weren't out then), but they have effectively the same video decode hardware as the HD 2600XT listed in that article, without the accompanying pitfalls.

I agree with newsposter generally on his Vista comments.  I'd probably stick to XP for HTPC uses for now, mostly due to driver quality issues.

[glynor]

Here's a relevant quote from the above linked Anandtech article:

Remember that these are average CPU utilization figures. Neither the AMD nor the NVIDIA high end parts are able to handle decoding in conjunction with the old P4 part. Our NetBurst architecture hardware just does not have what it takes even with heavy assistance from the graphics subsystem and we often hit 100% CPU utilization without one of the GPUs that support bitstream decoding.

Of course, bitstream decoding delivers in a HUGE way here, not only making HD H.264 movies watchable on older CPUs, but even giving us quite a bit of headroom to play with. We wouldn't expect people to pair the high end hardware with these low end CPUs, so there isn't much of a problem with the lack in this area.

...

For our older hardware, Yozakura is simply not watchable without bitstream decoding. With the numbers for the high end AMD and NVIDIA GPUs even worse than under our Transporter 2 trailer test, it's clear that NetBurst does not like whatever Yozakura is doing. It may be that decoding the bitstream when MBAFF is used is branch heavy causing lots of stalls. All we can say for sure is that, once again, GPU accelerated bitstream decoding is necessary to watch H.264 content on older/slower hardware.

Note: Yozakura is one of the first HD-DVD movies that was released in Japan.  It was encoded with H.264 High-Complexity profile, which is commonly used on HD-DVD videos even now (and will be used effectively universally in the future as hardware improves), which is why it is often used in Video performance testing.

[glynor]

There are AGP HD 2600 cards available for about $100. 

I'd maybe ask Dr.C on this forum before you go this route because he has had a lot of experience with his.  There are apparently some driver issues with the AGP cards and the H264 acceleration on certain motherboards (looks like mostly the Nvidia Nforce2 boards, which the P4 wouldn't have).

[newsposter]

I believe that dropped frames are more a function of disk throughput than video card or processor performance.

But yes, it is possible to saturate a P4 generation cpu with video data.  1080p video is one of the few applications that will.  Compared to that kind of load, most games including Crysis, are trivial to deal with.

I would still look for a reasonably fast DX9 video card though.  Sometimes it helps to understand exactly how much infomation (data) your display device can really show and then adjust the video card and playback software to match.  It makes no sense to run playbacks at max-possible resolution if your display device is going to throw away a percentage of it.

[gundan]

Thanks for all your insightful responses, but here is one thing I forgot to mention :-).
I need a half size agp video card(due to the limitation of the case) and unfortunately I don't see many options at all.  So from the comments here, this solution may not work after all.  It comes with a 64 meg nvidia video card, I may give it a shot still.

The funny thing is, when I do play some of the hd content in mkv containers that seem to play through my hp laptop onto my tv just fine.  This laptop has on board video too, hence my attempts & adventures.

The only saving grace is I am not spending any money for the PC :-).  Ah well, such is life.

[glynor]

I believe that dropped frames are more a function of disk throughput than video card or processor performance.......

Nope.  Not at all with H264 compression.  Read the linked article.

Optical drives have extremely low throughput anyway, compared to any hard drive.  That's one of the main reasons that such heavy duty compression is used on the HD discs.  Even though a BluRay disc can hold more data than a HD-DVD disc, you can't get that data off of the disc fast enough to handle HD at very high bitrates.  So, even though they have plenty of storage on disc, H264 compression allows them to store much higher quality video on disc than they could with MPEG-2 or VC-1 because of bitrate limits on the physical disc.

[glynor]

The funny thing is, when I do play some of the hd content in mkv containers that seem to play through my hp laptop onto my tv just fine.  This laptop has on board video too, hence my attempts & adventures.

720p video is another story entirely.  The P4 should be able to handle it, even with h264 compression, without much issue (as long as there aren't a bunch of background tasks running).  High-profile 1080p is basically unwatchable with lower-end CPUs though (commonly dropping to 10-12fps and never staying constant).

Also... I don't know what the quality of the MKV files you are referencing is, or how sensitive you are to dropped frames.  The tests I've seen are with commercially produced trailers (usually H264 compressed MP4 files) encoded at HD-DVD bitrates.  Lower bitrates are generally going to be easier to decompress.

I'm a video editor, so I don't even like to see one dropped frame.  You, on the other hand, might not mind if the video runs at 15fps!

[gundan]

I have to notice a dropped frame to miss it ;-).  The content I am seeing seems to primarily be in 720p.  I haven't tried 1080p yet, who knows how that will look?  I will try to transfer one of the trailers in my ps3 into the laptop and see whether it plays and if it does, how good/bad it is?

My other option is to buy a dedicated device like the ones made by tvix/popcornhour/mvix etc.

[glynor]

I have to notice a dropped frame to miss it ;-).  The content I am seeing seems to primarily be in 720p.

Yeah... Most "scene" releases (you know, from "those" sites with the patches over their eyes) are 720p x264 MKVs at fairly low bitrates.  Even my Athlon XP @ 2.4GHz can handle most of these without dropping frames!

A good place to get test material at 1080p is from Apple.  They have a bunch of trailers on their HD Gallery site (choose carefully though, a bunch of the "1080" ones are actually 1080i which has far lower horizontal resolution).  Unfortunately, they post them all in Quicktime wrappers (MOV) which makes it impossible to test any GPU acceleration (though apparently you can convert them to MP4 and then they'll work if you have QT Pro).

EDIT:  Here's another good spot, and these aren't in the stupid MOV container: http://www.h264info.com/clips.html

[glynor]

Also, be aware that any of the Apple trailers (and most others) are encoded using Apple's "broken" H264 codec, which is Main Profile only and is the simplest thing to decode.  x264 High-Profile is going to be much more like what you will see on most future BluRay or HD-DVD discs, and is far more demanding.

[gundan]

I am definitely not going to be playing any of the "truely" high res HD stuff on my pc(esp in the cheap one I am getting).  It is the x268 content you alluded to earlier. 

Honestly I am just fine with that content, it seems to look just fine in my tv.  For the actual BR content, I will just depend on my ps3.

[jmone]

I'd see how you go with your inbeded graphics.  I get tearing free 1080p output from my Shuttle (Vista Premium) just using its imbeded Intel G33 chipset over hdmi without any problems (note: I do have 2GB mem and a Q6600 to help out)....infact It is soooo much better than nVidia's offerings on Vista it is just not funny!

One big reason (for me) for MC12 over MS Media Center is that you can select what "Splitter" filters you can use where you are stuck with the MS one in MCE.  This opens up additional files that can be played back correctly.

MCE Remote also works fine (see other recent post on getting this to work)

Thanks
Nathan

[gundan]

Hello Nathan,

The specs of my machine are P4 2.8 ghz, 1 gig memory, 128 meg Nvidia Geforce FX5200.

I *think* this ought to be sufficient for my needs, I will find out soon enough.

G

[Alex B]

I built my current HTPC about four years ago. It has P4, 2.8 GHz, Hyperthreading, 1 GB DDR400 RAM and AGP ATI Radeon 9600 with DVI and S-Video outputs (I wanted passive cooling and didn't consider any of the top "gamer" models back then).

It has been a perfectly fine machine except for HD resolution H.264. Anything lesser plays fine, like HD MPEG2, HD Xvid, SD H.264, SD DV etc.

So far, I have just added bigger and faster drives about yearly. I have only recently considered upgrading to a new faster PC.

I wouldn't consider Vista for an old P4. I would obtain the cheapest and lightest XP version that is available. Windows XP MCE doesn't offer anything interesting for a JRiver Media Center user.