Re: [gentoo-user] Handbrake: Is it is or is it ain't in portage

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

On 17 Aug 2010, at 15:08, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> ...
> The clips do not play in any reasonable form. I get moments of  
> sound, and a few pixels changing on screen; nothing coherent. I'd  
> been told that H264 needs a lot of CPU and I guess an old 4-core 32- 
> bit XEON (effectively 800 MHz each) on 2 GB ECC DDR1 is not enough.   
> Okay.

Hi-def needs a lot of horses to play, I'm not sure about H264 compared  
to other codecs. H264 is designed so that specialised deciding chips  
(in mobile phones and set-top-boxes) can be built cheaply to aid  
playback, but on generic hardware I would imagine it would be a chunk  
more demanding than (say) the MPEG2 of the DVD standard written over a  
decade ago.

If you mean 4 *processors* at 800mhz, then that's Pentium III  
territory, and you have no chance. You'd really be requiring a Core2  
class machine. A Pentium 4 is likely to struggle.

Video playback does parallelise, if the player is written for that.  
But 800mhz is still massively underpowered for hi-def video.

Stroller.