Am I being too optimistic with this h/w?

Nistrod · 2012-04-25, 03:07 AM

Acer Aspire SA10, Celeron 2.8GHz, 1.5GB memory
Windows 7 Enterprise
nVidia GeForce 5500
Leadtek Winfast DV2000DS tuner

dxdiag says all is OK with the video card, but I can't find a decoder that works. Black screen all round.
Using EVR. My MPEG2 options are:
[INDENT]ffdshow
Microsoft DTV-DVD Video decoder
LAV Video decoder
Arcsoft Video Decoder
CBVA DMO Video wrapper[/INDENT]

This seems an acceptable spec for a machine, but am I being too optimistic?
Other suggestions?

Cheers

***sub*** · 2012-04-25, 03:23 AM

It's not the fastest CPU, but it should work.

Can you try viewing a channel, then post the npvr.log? I'll check if there is any odd directshow problems present.

Jakesty · 2012-04-25, 04:54 AM

My lowly atom 330 1.6ghz dual core computer works ok with regular digital video, but forget HD. You should be fine.

mvallevand · 2012-04-25, 05:30 AM

It's hard to answer questions about how a machine that wasn't a performance machine in it's day will work 8 years later without being a little bit pessimistic. I'd expect to see lowend dual core Atom 330 would perform the single core small-cache Celeron. The ION in the Atom with h/w acceleration should certainly be able to do HD better than the FX5500.

Martin

johnsonx42 · 2012-04-25, 05:43 AM

What sort of driver are you using for that FX5500 with Windows 7? NVidia doesn't have a downloadable Win7 driver for anything older than the 6x00 series. I'm wondering if the driver you have just doesn't support the right video features.

Also, have you tried other video renderers?

Nistrod · 2012-04-25, 06:03 AM

Logs attached.
However, it seems to be OK with Microsoft DTV-DVD decoder now.
Not sure what I did - but there was a tuner card driver uninstall/reinstall in there. (???)

Live TV is a little jerky - but maybe this is just old disk tech.
Even playback is that bit jumpy. The CPU is running at about 90% when playing back, so the video card doesnt seem to be giving much hardware help.

I suspect that the combination of CPU/disk/video card is just a little bit too old to be really useful.

Ah well, it was worth the attempt.
Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

Nistrod · 2012-04-25, 06:07 AM

I am using the Vista drivers.
I tried some of the VMR renderers, but nothing worked until the driver reinstall.
And no, I do not understand why a tuner driver reinstall should fix a video decoder issue.
I may have done something else, but know not what!

***sub*** · 2012-04-25, 07:28 AM

No sign of problems in those logs.

Quote:nVidia GeForce 5500

From memory an nvidia 6600 or higher was needed to get hardware accelleration of HD playback, so it's probably pretty dependent on your CPU. 90% is pretty high, and likely the cause of your problems.

Graham · 2012-04-25, 09:15 AM

Have you tried VMR9 FSE as the video renderer?

jcjefferies · 2012-04-25, 04:04 PM

As has been said the processor should be just about ok for SD but the memory could be a marginal. It may be worth disabling some unused Windows features to free up memory to reduce swapping to disk. Its quite easy to save several hundred MB of memory.

I assume it is an AGP video card so there is no chance of updating to a more modern one. I have a similar FX5600 video card which was fine for SD video with a 2GHz processor under XP. If you look at the DSF/MFT view tab of DXVA Checker and see if any decoders enable the “GPU Acceleration” tab when selected. The Cyberlink SP video decoder is the only one I have seen which does SD video acceleration and that reduces processor use by almost 50%. Its just depends if your video card has the functions that the decoder uses. Also I seem to remember that the Overlay video renderer uses less processor power than the others but presumably with a reduction in quality.