Minimum hardware specs for 'good' boxee experience?

[mstar]

I'm looking to use Boxee on Ubuntu (any version)...

Since I'm going to try on it on a lower end machine (not quite 'that old laptop/desktop that you are too embarrassed to give away' but close...) that I'm no longer using I'm interested in peoples experiences, especially those who did it on more bare bones machines and the good/bad results they got and anything extra they did...

In other words, what is the lowest spec machine that Boxee can run on with relatively good performance?

(Please be brief but detailed and I assume box is dedicated to boxee, and no other processes)

Anyone care to get the ball rolling?

Thanks,
m

[agentlame]

the most important requirement is by far an opengl 1.4 comptiable video card.

after that, any p4-era proc, and 512 to 1GB of ram should do well.

[redalert007]

Im using right now a dedicated Barebone:
Shuttle K45 + Celeron 1.8 + 2GB ram + 1 sata disk 250gb.

http://global.shuttle.com/product_detail.jsp?PI=1068

That's it.

[blurryg]

runs fine on my latitude d620... but I was considering getting a dell studio hybrid for boxee and general htpc testing/playing.

[scoot]

I could not get 1080p to playback smoothly on a p4 2.8 w/ 1G of ram, or even a AMD X2 2.5. 720 would work fine, but I wanted to....future proof the box a little.

Finally using a Core 2 E7300. Plays everything great.

[nohj]

I could not get 1080p to playback smoothly on a p4 2.8 w/ 1G of ram, or even a AMD X2 2.5. 720 would work fine, but I wanted to....future proof the box a little.

Finally using a Core 2 E7300. Plays everything great.

would a AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 3.1GHz 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM2 be good enough?

will this be good enough for 1080p output?

i'm trying to find a cheap cpu/mobo that'll output 1080p and optical audio-- either separately or the same hdmi cable-- anyone have any suggestions??

i'm from the mac camp but am building a linux box to run boxee-- i love it on my macbook but figure it'd be better used elsewhere!!

thanks!!

[ctech]

I'm also looking for hardware requirements for running Boxee and 1080p .mkv files.

[misterjamin]

I'm also looking for hardware requirements for running Boxee and 1080p .mkv files.

I think you'd probably struggle to find any linux system, regardless of the hardware, that'll play high-bitrate 1080p, mainly due to the fact that the h264 decoder (x264) is single threaded at time of writing. You can stick as many cores in as you like but it'll make no difference.

NVidia drivers for newer cards current in Beta do offer some hardware offload for h264 decoding, and they're probably you're best bet at the moment, but I doubt Boxee includes the necessary video output stuff to utilise it. There are patches for mplayer floating about though

[jeremydbrooks]

Trying to run on an old machine with a fresh install of Intrepid:

K7 Athlon @ 1.05MHz
384MB RAM
Plenty of HDD, probably 30GB open
Geforce2, not sure how much memory...64MB, I would guess

Yeah, slow isn't even the word. It took me ten minutes to enter my password, and another twenty for the QoS trailer to creep by frame by frame.

No Boxee for me...this is my only test PC for now.

[breynded]

I've been running boxee on an atom single core before with 2 gb or ram, runs great with divx files, chokes on 720p and higher tried dual core flavor as well, some improvement in playback but not enough. you can use any of the core2 duos and it will be able to run fine.