H264 playback (Mpeg4) on mobile processor

[Sergey]

I'm looking to upgrade to a new DVB-S S2 card but specs say that you need a P4 3.2Ghz to decode the stream without any problems.

This computer uses a mobile celeron 1300 and the system was able to receive
euro1080 (was still broadcating in mpeg2 at that time) but the computer shifted this down to a 800x600 resolution. Results was visible artifacts.

The videocard is a matrox G550 - 32MMB ram.
System has 512MB ram for windowsXP and the view application (TVCentral)

Pentium M's are faster compared to their celeron counterparts but is a Pentium M fast enough do the job. Or perhaps even more related to videocard? I don't have the oppertunity to experiment allot.

Cheers,

Sergey

 

[mpjesse]

Most decoding drivers use the processor to decode H264 streams. So video card would have almost nothing to do with it. (Newer desktop videocards do have some sort of H264 acceleration... but it's not a show stopper). ATI has something out that increases encoding by up to 5x... but that's just encoding. Decoding is much simpler.

Anyways, Pentium M's/Centrino are significantly faster than Celeron M's and even Pentium 4 Mobile (at the same clock speed). The 2MB L2 cache is what owns.

I personally have a 1.6Ghz Pentium M (centrino really, but it's all the same) w/ 512MB of RAM. It decodes Apple's H.264 without a hitch. It also does high definition XVID without a hitch.

-mpjesse

 

[Sergey]

Okay, thanks alot Mpjesse,


I'll move to a Pentium M755 (2 Ghz, 400Mhz FSB, 2048KB L2 cache)