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Defy Belief

Defy Belief

Defy Belief

Soldato
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29 Sep 2010
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So I've recently picked up a zotac zbox, It's running pretty slow, youtube streaming and I can't do a lot else and even then the video seems to stutter every now and then :(

Currently running Win10 64 bit. Thinking if I were to switch to Linux would I see a noticeable difference?

It's an atom 330 1.6ghz chip with nvidia ion gpu onboard. 4GB ram, sandisk SSD.

Literally all it is being used for is to stream youtube etc, so I just want it to do this effortlessly.

Any thoughts appreciated. :)
 
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Getting youtube to stream nicely is all about hardware acceleration, and that's one of the few areas where the original OS (presumably Windows) could well have an advantage over Linux/Unix/etc (IMO) as you know 100% it'll have all the drivers.

That atom is from the end of 2008 so I suppose it originally came with Vista installed?

I'd suggest getting a Linux Mint live CD as it comes with decent multimedia stuff preinstalled (the MATE or Xfce editions are probably lowest requirement but Cinammon isn't bad) and see how the performance is. If it's great, keep it.
 
If you're looking to get better youtube performance it might be worthwhile giving the h264ify extension a go. It is available on Chrome and Firefox.

Youtube tries to use the VP9 codec for most videos which is not hardware accelerated on many GPUs. Your ION chip is sitting idle while the Atom does all the hard work.

h264ify forces the browser to use a h264 encoded version of the youtube video which is widely supported - you should see a big difference.

As for lightweight linux distros I agree with what has been said above. Lubuntu might be worth a try too but I think it is a bit heavier than puppy and openelec.
 
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^ Interesting. Just checked with my old 7850 and it accelerates VP9 fine.

Check the format on youtube by right clicking on the player > stats for nerds > mime type will say codecs="vp9" for VP9 or "avc..." for H.264.

With VP9 I was getting some GPU usage spikes in GPU-Z. I went to about:config and changed media.mediasource.webm.enabled to false and the player changed to avc, and still looked the same in GPUZ. (This is probably what that extension does along with a few others for mediasource and VP8.)

Might be different on different hardware.
 
I'll definitely give that extension a go for sure, I've installed openelec and it's working perfectly, no lag, cpu fan is silent now as it's not putting much stress on it at all. (would get to 90 degrees plus and 100 percent load with YouTube! And can't remove the cooler to replace the paste etc :( )

Only issue is that it's not a pc so I don't have a Web browser etc. But it's mainly gonna be a media pc anyway so fits the bill perfect so far. :)
 
@joeyjojo I too couldn't see a difference on my main system, but on my laptop which has an i5 3210m there is a massive difference in CPU usage between using VP9 or H264 codecs. This doesn't make any difference to video playback since the processor is fast enough to cope, but it has implications for weak processors and battery life on portable devices.

Video used: [60FPS] The Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) - Official Trailer 2

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfwjzNB--5k


i5-3210m using VP9:

hffH3sZ.png

i5-3210m using H264 forced using the H264ify extension:

QwJgURr.png
 
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