2010

Fri, Nov 5

<18:55 EEST> Whoa! I have just installed mplayer-uau from the Gentoo multimedia overlay, and it plays 720p H.264 videos smoothly on an Intel Atom D510, without any GPU acceleration. That is, smoother than ordinary MPlayer on a Core 2 Duo T7200. Some people report that it can play Full HD on an Atom, and given the roughly 70% CPU load with 720p, this is quite possible. The D510 has two cores with two-way hyperthreading, so the threading capabilities of mplayer-uau become apparent, though they should help with a single CPU as well, due to more even temporal load distribution.

Oh, yeah, my new Atom system. I guess it started a long while ago, when I noticed that GPUs are the fastest and most efficient hardware for parallel number-crunching. A basic but sufficient Radeon would not cost too many tens or euros, but the problem was my complete lack of PCI Express slots. My small and low-energy systems did not have such extravagancies, and integrated graphics had been good enough for my needs.

This fall I encountered a sufficiently important distributed computing project to invest in a new machine. Of course, my ideals dictated a cheap and low-energy motherboard that could just about accommodate PCIe cards, while having generally OSS-friendly hardware and sensible connectors, such as digital video and audio outputs. A passive-cooled Radeon (for OSS friendliness and computational efficiency) was chosen to keep the entire system under 80 to 90 watts, so I could use an old PicoPSU. HD and RAM were likewise salvaged from other machines.

In the long term, this may replace my existing media/gaming machine. I expected video playing to require GPU acceleration, which is not yet quite easily realized in Linux, but mplayer-uau did the trick without any GPU assistance. So the Zotac motherboard might work for my media needs even without the Radeon. Unfortunately, the integrated video outputs have weird limitations. Meanwhile, mplayer-uau should provide improved smoothness and less CPU taxation on any machine :)