Too old for HD?

Sasso

Sasso

Sasso

Soldato
Joined
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Swansea, Wales
hey ive been meaning to get a SFF box for the bedroom so i can stream my HD films to the tv in there. currently use my pc on the network to host the films and the main tv streams via the ps3 and does a great job....

now my gf gave me a sff pc that her work was throwing away and iv'e been tinkering with it but... damm it's pretty old :p spec as follows:

VIA C3 cpu @[email protected]
128mb ddr pc2700 RAM (currently got a 512mb stick in there...)
cd drive :p
EPIA-ML mobo
80GB IDE HDD

so yea its a pretty low spec xD it did have some linux software on it called IMAGESOUND ....and from the UI im guessing it was a PA controller or something similar?

so far i swapped out the cd drive for a dvd drive and i've whacked on windows 7 :D it's performance is.... slow at best haha..... when it's doing nothing the background processes keep the CPU close to 100%... tried to stream a vid using WMP... was getting about 1 frame every 4 seconds... so not the best performance.


just wondering if there's anything i can do to improve this? like doing a more minimal install of win7, or maybe XP? as it's only going to be use for films is there another OS i can install that pretty much only runs the processes for the network and media play back?

yea kinda a noob at this haha :p

so yea? can anyone help? or is the 800mhz CPU really limiting the playback as it's onboard graphics? it has a pci gfx slot would having a gfx card help or am i barking up the wrong tree xP
 
get a cheap pci graphics card and it should do the job. bit more ram if you can (1gb min) and im sure you'll see much better performance. A sata HDD will probably speed things up a lot as well.
 
yea trying to get my hands on a 1gb stick as it only has the one slot :p no sata connections and it's streaming over lan so im guessing it would be stored in the memory rather than the HDD. so ill keep an eye out for a short pci card then :)

by the way is it possible to install windows media center as a standalone OS... so i dont have all the other windows stuff running too?
 
manged to find a copy of windows xp media center 2005in a local pc shop bargain bucket :D so I've installed that now and update it.... tho i should it would only be the media center not actually xp..... is there a way to make it boot only into the media center? like standalone without having all the other xp rubbish going too?
 
In short the answer is no! best option would be tu run it as a front end for Media Portal or XBMC (Both have linux support and runs much smoother than on windows) and have a sever/Main PC to run the back end hardware
 
might look into media portal then :)

nah not a light system, audio i think as the linux interface that was on it had a lot of sound sliders as the only options :p

might make it into a nas... but its only got IDE connectors so i can;t put my 2tb sata drive on it... booooo
 
HD? I think on that spec you'll be lucky to get 800x640 of video.

Ok a bit of an exxageration, but no I don't think you'll get HD on there.
 
ah well, was fun experimenting about with it... looks like ill need to buy a bit better mini ITX board then :)
 
Get a cheap E350 based motherboard getting you motherboard + heatsink and then buy a cheap stick of DDR3 all for less than £100.
 
ooo i shall have to look into that :) i want to spend as little as possible xP

installed geexbox on it last night and it streamed dvd accross the network fine.... and also some 720p videos in .avi format.... but most of the HD films i have stored are in x264 mpeg2 format and i don't think geexbox likes that format as they either just don't play or they play stuttery but with the screen kinda duplicated on either side of the main video with lines accross it.... dunno what that's about :P
 
Thats why I suggested it. They are cheap and have nice integrated graphics for decoding while the dual core CPU will be able to handle any I/O you will need.

Very power efficient (might even use less than the VIA) so if the case you are using has standard power plugs you are set.
 
tidy thanks, tho cheapest ive seen it so far is over 100£ and im not sure if that comes with ram :\ booooo ill keep hunting :D
 
Sasso said:
tidy thanks, tho cheapest ive seen it so far is over 100£ and im not sure if that comes with ram :\ booooo ill keep hunting :D
Click to expand...

You'll get a board for a touch over 100 quid mate but none of them come with ram,you have to buy that seperately.
 
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