calling all Linux users. Old Pentium 4 (R) computer being turned into Netflix HTPC Advice

[Petabyte]

Hi all. Right now this old Dell Optiplex GX260 is running Ubuntu 14.04 but it's going really slow so I'm thinking the OS is too much for it. I'm thinking of lightening the load with Xubuntu or Lubuntu and thoughts on a recommended Distro or am I on the right track. Also I'm not too sure the integrated graphics is enough to run Netflix. If I need a GPU what would be the good match for the Pentium 4 single core processor. Cheapest route would be best to give this old bessy a new job to do.

 

[spankmon]

Mint 17.1 Xfce or Mate are both solid and light. If you use Xfce (my favorite) be sure to turn-off compositing and disable the screensaver. There are others with lighter desktops, but I don't think they are lighter-enough to make much of a difference compared to Mate or XFCE.

Since you already have Ubuntu, you might try installing LXDE then logout and on the login screen choose the option to login to a LXDE session. That way you could give it a go without re-installing the whole shebang.

 

[Petabyte]

So you guys think this CPU is too weak to handle a GPU like I mentioned above? Or are the first comments in this thread right and not invest any time or money in this......

 

[woundedwolf]

After reading this thread, I was inspired to take on a similar task of resurrecting an old laptop with the following specs:

Dell Inspiron 5100
Pentium 4 2.66 (32-bit)
2GB RAM
Radeon M9 Mobility 9000 128MB video
Belkin 54g PCMCIA wireless card

So here are the distros that I tried:

Peppermint 6 32-bit
LXLE 32-bit
Mint 17.2 Cinnamon 32-bit (changed to LXDE after install)

This laptop has an S-Video port that I can connect to an old CRT TV in the back bedroom of my house. My goal here was to see if I could get this old hardware to run YouTube and Netflix "reasonably well".

Of the above three distros, I was least impressed with Peppermint 6. I had used Peppermint 3 a couple years ago and was very satisfied. The newest Peppermint seemed a bit clunky and just didn't impress me. LXLE was very impressive and was the only distro to correctly detect and install the PCMCIA wireless drivers out of the box.

However, I was also very surprised to find that Mint 17.2 (my "go to" distro) ran equally as fast as LXLE once I switched the desktop environment over to LXDE after installation. Mint did not detect the wireless drivers out of the box, I had to pull in the legacy drivers to get it to work.

So as not to rely upon Wine for Silverlight emulation, I downloaded the latest release of Chrome so that videos would run under HTML5. On first try, LXLE was rather horrible. YouTube was unwatchable and Netfix was even worse. Mint ran slightly better, but still not really watchable (maybe 3 or 4 frames per second). The bottleneck was the CPU, it was completely pegged in all three distros.

There are several recommended "tweaks" that can be done in Chrome to improve performance, which I did. These perhaps provided a slight performance improvement, maybe 10 frames per second at the beginning of the video. But soon the lag took over and the videos were unwatchable. Netflix was particularly bad.

I began theorizing that perhaps the GPU was not being utilized so I attempted to validate that using the Radeon utilities. However the M9 Mobility 9000 card is too old to detect GPU usage using the Linux Radeon utilities. Everything I could find seemed to indicate that the video card was detected and configured correctly, so I concluded that the CPU was just too slow to run YouTube and Netflix.

I believe this CPU is a Northwood core, lacking Hyper-Threading. I would guess that maybe a Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading might be able to pull this off. I'm still uncertain of the role of the GPU when playing videos over the web. It is possible that a top-end AGP graphics card might take some of the load off the CPU (totally guessing here).

I have an old Northwood 2.8 GHz desktop out in my garage somewhere with a pretty beefy AGP card. If I get really bored someday I may give this another go. But the final verdict on the laptop is that it just can't do it. Another possibility is to set up the an XWindows dumb terminal connected via wireless to another machine in the house that can run Netflix and YouTube. No idea if this would even work, but I'd like to try it.

For all the haters out there, this is what legacy computing is about... squeezing everything you can out of an old piece of hardware, just because it is there. It is like putting a V8 engine in an old VW Beetle. Can it be done? We will only know if we try.

 

[Petabyte]

I'm sorry it took so long to reply. Did you ever dig that card out and try the Netflix test with that old piece woundedwolf? I've decided that the first comment was right. It was just not worth it. A single core old pentium and the integrated GPU just couldn't cut. I was getting 1-2 frames it was choppier than hell. I did however manage to get a hold of another old Dell T3400 with a Core 2 Duo and NVIDIA Quadro NVS 290 having 128 mb of Vram. I'm thinking the dual core processor 2 gigs of ram and 128 mb of vram will do the trick. Just have to buy a DVI to HDMI and boom we got a Netflix HTPC from old hardware.

 

[Petabyte]

What do you guys think of upgrading the above Dell T3400? I started a different thread if you have any thoughts on that.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2842937/thinking-resurrecting-aged-775-socket-semi-good-gaming.html

 

[woundedwolf]

Did you ever dig that card out and try the Netflix test with that old piece woundedwolf?

Okay, so I finally did get bored and pulled that old Dell Dimension 4600 desktop out of the garage. I forgot that I had hacked it up and tried to put a new mobo in there, but I still had the original parts and actually got it all together and running again. I didn't have a spare hard drive handy, but I was able to get it to boot into Puppy Linux from USB without any problem. I seem to be having trouble with the onboard NIC setup though, so I haven't gotten to the Netflix/YouTube test yet. When I get it connected to the Internet I will let you know how it turns out. Here are the specs for this machine:

Dell Dimension 4600
2.8 GHz Pentium 4 (Northwood)
2.5GB RAM
XFX Nvidia Geforce 7600GT 256MB AGP 8x

I think it has plenty of RAM and the video card is top of the line for an AGP slot. If there is a bottleneck it will be the CPU. This was my desktop circa 2006, so it would be rather stunning to make it viable 10 years later. I don't think I could have browsed the web in 1995 with my Commodore 64 (although I have heard others have successfully done this!).

In case it is of interest, I did a little research on what minimum hardware setup is required for a machine to browse today's Internet (December 2015). Given all the embedded video that is found today, I think the minimum YouTube/Netflix requirements are a good benchmark. I couldn't find specific hardware requirements from either of them, but YouTube does pass off their requirements as compatibility with Flash Reader, which Adobe lists as:

• 
  2.33GHz or faster x86-compatible processor, or Intel® Atom™ 1.6GHz or faster processor for netbooks
  32- and 64-bit (unless noted): Microsoft® Windows® XP SP3 (32-bit), Windows Vista® (32-bit), Windows 7, Windows 8.x and Windows 10
  Internet Explorer 8.0 or later, latest versions of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox., Google Chrome and Opera
  512MB of RAM (1GB of RAM recommended for netbooks); 128MB of graphics memory

Netflix lists their requirements by browser compatibility (Chrome 37, Firefox 42, etc.). Here are the Firefox 42 hardware requirements:

• 
  Pentium 4 or newer processor that supports SSE2
  512MB of RAM
  200MB of hard drive space

So to boil this down: if you have anything less than a Pentium 4 or Celeron (Northwood core or better) @ 2.4 GHz then streaming video will not happen for you. My above test configuration should be fine on RAM and video, but the CPU is going to be the determining factor. Given the poor results with the Pentium 4 2.66 GHz CPU on my old laptop, I'm not going to hold my breath.

I'd really be curious to test my old Duron 1300 rig, but that is a garage resurrection I will leave for another day!

 

[woundedwolf]

So this totally worked! I am posting from the Dell Dimension 4600 Pentium 4 2.8 GHz right now.

No hard drive, I'm running Linux Mint 17.2 Xfce (which is becoming my new favorite Linux DE) from a USB drive. I found an old USB wifi adapter that Mint identified as soon as I plugged it in. Display is set at 1280x1024 on my old 17" monitor. I opened up Firefox and navigated to YouTube. Video played flawlessly at 360p, not even a stutter! I played the Star Wars: Force Awakens trailer and upped it to 480p, it ran fine. When I bumped it to 720p things got a bit choppy. 1080p was not watchable.

Next I downloaded Chrome so I could try out Netflix. Got it installed and played an old episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, no problem, no lag, no stutter. I tried to find an HD video, the closest I found was some "moving art" thing. I don't think Netflix was feeding me HD, but it wouldn't have mattered at my resolution anyway. Regardless, the video came through just fine, no stuttering, no pixelization.

I can't believe I didn't do this 5 years ago. Hey everybody, go grab those old Pentium 4 boxes, slap in a decent video card, a couple gigs of RAM, throw Linux Mint Xfce on it and enjoy your new el cheapo HTPC!

 

[MU_Engineer]

I am the king of running old slow hardware under Linux as an HTPC- first a PIII 1000EB, then an old 2.2 P4-M laptop, then a Duron 1600, then a dual-socket Xeon LV system with two Core Duo T2500s (for a long time), and then I just upgraded to a dual Xeon X5460 setup.

- Pretty well all HD out there except for unencrypted QAM cable (essentially local channels only) is going to be H.264. Streaming video is H.264 and anything captured from a STB with an HD-PVR is H.264. Unencrypted QAM cable will be MPEG-2. You can play back MPEG-2 HDTV using XvMC acceleration on old AGP cards such as GeForce 6000 series. H.264 requires a GeForce 8000 or Radeon HD 4000 series card or newer, none of which are available in AGP. You can get them in PCI but PCI does not have enough bus bandwidth to actually display an HD image. So your old P4 has to be an old P4 with a 900-series chipset with PCIe such as the ubiquitious 945 chipset, not an 800-series chipset.

- It takes at least a 3 Ghz Core 2 Duo to play back 1080p H.264 using just the CPU to decode. The only P4-based setups that could hope to do it would be dual Paxvilles, dual Xeon 50xx units, or some quad-CPU Xeon MP setups using ffmpeg-mt. These machines will pretty much all be PCIe-based so you might as well just stick in a modern GPU and let it do the heavy lifting. Yes, you can stick a new PCIe 3.0 GPU into an old PCIe 1.1 board and it will work fine.

- 4K H.264 playback in software requires a high-end new CPU or dual-CPU setup. My 28-core AMD Opteron setup can but it's the only thing in the house that can.

 

[Petabyte]

Well thanks for getting back and the info. Yes I can confirm that a Core 2 Duo rig will do it. The Dell T3400 with

Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 / 2.4 GHz
2 Gig RAM
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 290

Will play Netflix using Chrome on Linux Ubuntu 64.
Playback was a little choppy at 1080p not too bad though. Lowering to 720p would run fine. A cheap but better GPU would work. I was thinking of Upgrading CPU to the Intel Core 2 Quad which would probably help things drastically. They are about 100$ though and a 750 ti. The computer would have a new job as a semi gaming rig