I appreciate the replies in all of the posts, above. They give me some avenues for research. Additional suggestions welcomed.
andymcca wrote:dougz wrote:What "cheap video solutions" were you thinking about? Roku? Apple TV?
I just meant a discrete graphics card. Depending on what you are looking for, $40-$80 can get you a card with plenty of 2D acceleration capabilities. But the big downside with these is getting the drivers working, and then getting your software to use the acceleration. VDPAU (nVidia) is supported by some software (MythTV, and I think VLC?), but if you have a favorite player you'd have to double check. Hopefully driver support for Vista would not be a problem. I have no clue about that.
Cheap graphics card would be fine and drivers are not difficult. Support in discrete media players can be researched relatively easily.
It gets stickier when you get to browser support for streaming HTML5 video. What plugin gets called on an Apple-type page (H.264) or Google-type page (VP8)? What happens under Firefox or Chrome/Chromium? This appears to add several layers of complexity.
I know I'm not really keeping up with all the driver/player/HTML5 minutia, but it appears to me that one needs to use a brute force CPU solution under Linux, at least for now. I'd really
love to be shown how that thesis is wrong.
ilovejedd wrote:You don't really need to upgrade to a Core 2 Duo if you need to replace the CPU with something better. I reckon any of the Core 2-based Celeron or Pentium Wolfdales would suffice. Starts at $50. I actually got a Celeron E3300+Biostar G41 combo from Fry's for $30 a few months back. Now that's cheap.
Newegg - Wolfdale
I agree with this as long as encoding time for ripping a DVD collection is not an issue, and the resolution of the video is not insanely high. Also if your software only uses a single thread, then the second core would not do much good
But now that I look back at the OP, I agree that a single core solution would work just fine. I agree with your OP that replacing the processor sounds best. It's nice that there are still many options for LGA775! This sounds cheaper and easier than trying to mess with discrete graphics or a whole new motherboard.
On a side note: doesn't the lack of the DRM stack in Moonlight suck? I was using the windows XP on my netbook for netflix until I got the wii disk. Was not fun. This is all M$'s fault for not releasing the stack.
They even started the Moonlight project, but gimped it because they will not license the stack.
I'm a bit of a Luddite WTR Moonlight/mono. I belong to the "Miguel is
evil" school of thought. I won't install his stuff.
I find that I spend far more time keeping Vista secure, even with the help of Secunia's wonderful PSI 2.0, than I do keeping Debian Testing secure and current. And I only use Vista for Netflix and light browsing related to streaming. I use Debian for everything else. Microsoft products (and presumably clones) have never been secured properly for the Internet, IMHO.
Edit: I think flash added hardware acceleration support in version 10.1, but I'm not sure how well this is supported in linux, and I'm not sure if it can use VDPAU or some other interface. Someone more up-to-date on the state of flashplayer would have to weigh in on that.
Edit2: Also beware the terrible Adobe support for 64bit kernels (as of a few months ago anyway). You may not have been planning on a fresh install, but if you were thinking about installing a 64bit linux OS, be prepared to get a little frustrated when installing flashplayer.
According to
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/:
Hardware acceleration
Deliver smooth, high-quality video with minimal overhead across mobile devices and personal computers using H.264 video decoding.
No help for VP8, or H.264 that's not in a Flash container.
And, according to
http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/?promoid=BUIGP:
64-bit users: Download a preview release of Flash Player with native support for 64-bit Linux from Adobe Labs.
I'm not planning to go 64 bit Linux while Flash is still in flux. While I consider Flash to be an insecure, buggy, bloated, inefficient mess, I have to use it.
Another complication is that Chrome/Chromium automatically includes it, but it isn't current. I have Chromium 7.0.517.44 under Debian and the include Flash tests as 10,1,103,19. According to
http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/?promoid=BUIGP, Flash 10,1,102,64 is current for Linux.
I don't always agree with Steve Jobs, but "Death to Adobe Flash"! It will be a great day when I can uninstall it.
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Bottom line: Looks like the best solution is to find an affordable CPU upgrade that will make the box usable for a year or so and then do a bigger upgrade -- mobo/GPU/CPU/RAM when further progress is made on Linux drivers, players, and HTML5 video is better understood.
Right?