I have a Celeron 733 (compaq presario 5000) with a Geforce MX 4000 (440 pci based) video card and 256 megs ram. Connected to the same switch as the backend running an Athlon64, 512 megs ram.

I can play/record and do everything fine on the athlon 64 in itself, but when i try and play anything on the celeron it gets "prebuffering pause" and slows down to a crawl.

I am using firewire as the input from a comcast 6200 cable box. Is my problem that the firewire is a raw mpeg stream already and the backend is simply trying to push that to the frontend and its not capable of handling it or could it be another issue??

front end is just a dedicated front end.. the only other odd thing i see is that the frontend has an internal video card that shows up under lspci but it does look like it uses the geforce correctly when booted into x.. just not sure if this old hardware is being identified right and i may have an irq conflict that could never be solved because of crummy compaq bios support.

If there is anything i can tweak or try, it would be apprecaited.. I have a feeling that its just pushing 720x480 mpeg data across the network and the celeron just doesn't have the capacity to play it.. but i was hoping just being a player it would work. (using latest knoppmyth installed locally on drive for front end)

It sounds like your problem is that your system isn't decoding video fast enough to keep up. The backend process is really pretty easy on the system, it's the frontend who does all the work by converting that mpeg data back into a video image.

If you're not using the "nvidia" driver, I'd start with that. If you can get XvMC running on your video card, that might tip the balance in your favor. XvMC is a special driver that offloads some of the mpeg processing onto the video card's processor. I'm not sure the 440MX has the ability to use it, tho.

You may just be too underpowered to use that hardware for the frontend. Maybe you need to swap the frontend for the backend?

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yes the 440mx supports xvmc, but all the inherent xvmc problems still apply.

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XvMC - i'll check it out and see if that helps. Any quick pointers on getting it setup?

what are the known issues you guys have experienced wtih XvMC?

Anyonw know what the sweetspot for standard definition tv is with cpu power for a frontend?

If you have the nVidia binary driver installed, just go to the playback setup page and check the XvMC box. If you DON'T have the nVidia driver installed -- by all means try that first. Just the driver can make a huge difference over the standard VESA driver.

To install the nVidia driver on R5Axx, first untar the kernel sources. Then execute the install script called install-nvidia-6629.sh (or something close).

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worked like a charm, thanks all! playback is smooth..

now i just need to work on rewind/fastforward and stability.. is this reletive to XvMC issues that i hear about? now that i have the driver installed should i disable XvMC and see if that works better - heard about issues with OSD that could be causing my problems..

freezing on rewind/ff and various other places particularly but not exclusively when the osd is coming on or leaving the screen is indicative of xvmc problems. you can try without xvmc and see if you have enough cpu to playback without it, but I doubt it. you'll know when it's turned off cause the osd will be blue not greyscale.

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