Ongoing Minimum horsepower for music-only system? (1 Viewer)

[NFW]

I have a 600mhz Via mini-ITX system running MediaPortal and I am concerned that I have underestimated the CPU and disk speed requirments. For now I am only interested in playing music, so I was hoping that this low-power super-quiet system would be sufficient. However, there are a few scenarios in which the MP UI locks up for several seconds or minutes, and that is making me question my hardware choices.

I should point out before I go further that all of my music is encoded with WMA lossless, so the files are pretty big, and I think that might be part of the problem. They're also stored on an external drive connected by USB 2.

The worst scenario is when I select a playlist with a 100-200 songs. The first song starts playing after just a few seconds, but the UI is frozen for a couple minutes. I have run into this problem when using playlists created with MP and with Windows Media Player. What is the cause of this freeze, and is it likely to be fixed? Or even possible to be fixed?

My best guess is that MP is opening all of the files in the playlist, or something like that. But if that's the case, then what exactly was MP doing when it was scanning my music library? I assumed that it was building an index - could that index be used to speed up the opening of a new playlist? The other possiblity that occurs to me is that MP might be populating the list control in the UI. Could that be done on a background thread, or with a timer, to keep the UI responsive while the list is populated?

The other problem scenario is adding music from the library to a playlist. Again, the UI hangs here, though not for as long. Again, my best guess is that MP is opening each of the files to retrieve artist/album/track info, and again I wonder if an index could be used to speed that up.

I'd like to keep using the hardware that I have, but if these issues cannot be addressed that I'll have to upgrade. Should I start saving now, or can these scenarios be sped up or at least parallelized to keep the UI responsive?

Thanks in advance for any ideas...

 

[Callifo]

For just music the cpu requirements wont be as high. That system may have been sufficient if the video card was directx9. The Via low power solutions arent exactly that great for Mediaportal as the video cards onboard are crap.

 

[NFW]

I have a riser that allows adding a full-size PCI card to this system, so if I want to do video I will stick an nVidia card in there.

Audio is the only thing I want right now though. I am hoping that 600mhz and 1GB of RAM would be enough for that. Windows MCE doesn't run well on this box either, but I was hoping that a trimmed down MP system would be usable. (I disabled most of the plugins that are not directly related to music playback.)

 

[Efros]

try an nLite XP installation, will help get rid of extraneous processes. You may want to use an external music player to rid yourself of the resource hungry WMP.

 

[SciDoctor]

The problem with the setup you want to run is the onboard gpu .

MP requires a minimum DX9 spec gpu with strong driver support to run the MP GUI efficiently espeacialy on low cpu systems.

If the gpu is less than true DX8/.1 spec then your cpu usage goes through the roof, which means that any other processing gets even less cpu cycles and lockups/pauses will occur .

There is no way around this, espeacialy as you only have pci slots, I would start saving for a better Motherboard solution and put up with the MP pauses or use WINAMP.

 

[Bram]

For just music a 600Mhz intel CPU will be fine. But, as said before, you'll realy need a good directx9 videocard.
Keep in mind that a 600mhz CPU will not be sufficient to watch compressed movies that use a recent codec version of DirectX of Xvid. The movie will lose sync.

 

[ohdarklord]

you dont NEED a direct x 9 graphics card for media portal

ive been using a a direct x 8 card for the past 9 months just fine

but if you dont have a direct x 9 card there will be more stress on the cpu and it could be too much for the cpu.

I would try it out without a new graphics card first and if it dosent go well get somthing like a Geforce fx 5200

 

[NFW]

I understand that this motherboard will probably be useless for video playback. That's OK. Like I said in the subject of this thread, this is an audio only system. I might try it one day as an experiment, but my expectations will be low and I won't complain if it doesn't work. So let's forget all about video playback and recording. It's really totally irrelevant to me and I shouldn't even have mentioned it.

I have already switched the music player from WMP to "DirectX" which I assume will be less resource hungry.

I have trouble believing that the problem here is related to graphics though, since all it needs to do is display song titles and lists of songs. Will a DX9 graphics card really make a difference here? Far as I can tell, it only needs to do basic bitblt stuff, which has been around since forever. And I could put up with visible redraws. But screen painting is not the problem I'm seeing.

But the problem I'm seeing is a total lockup of the system when I choose a playlist or add a CD to a playlist. And for the latter scenario, the next screen is just a list of CDs, which MP has already demonstrated it can generate quickly enough.

I really don't think that the GUI stuff could possibly be placing enough demand on the CPU to hang the system like this.

 

[Callifo]

The entire interface is rendered like a game, being that cpu wont even be of equivalent speed to a P4/AMD 600mhz system I would think thats where the problem is coming from. If you run MP windowed and watch task manager for cpu usage, is it stuck on 100% permanently?