Re: Mini itx in a HTPC?

["Paul Robinson" <ukcueman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The results are in. I ran the tests on two mini-itx machines while playing
mp3, wav, flac
or wma. The wma file was encoded to 128kbps (is that high enough?). Slimp3s
both had
latest firmware (2.3) and the servers were running 5.2.0

I also tested with a single slimp3, two independent slimp3s and
synchronized slimp3s.
However, the cpu utilization for two synchronized slimp3s always appeared
the same as a
single slimp3, so isn't mentioned below.

The machines I tested on were:
(a) hush PC, EPIA 933MHz C3 Ezra, 512MB RAM, windows 2000
(b) EPIA MII 12000 (ie 1.2GHz) with 512MB RAM, windows XP pro

On both machines, mp3 took the least resources, then wav, then flac and wma
the most.

On the 933MHz machine, the wma took 40-45% cpu for one slimp3 and 65-70%
for two
On the 1.2GHz machine, the wma, flac and wav all took about 20% cpu for one
slimp3. For
two slimp3s, wma and flac took about 40% and and wav 30%. Two slimp3s
playing mp3s on this
machine took about 5% cpu - but this was around 15% on the 933.

In all cases, I never noticed any problems with playback.

The bottom line is that the newer machines handle this easily. If anyone
wants a higher
bitrate wma file testing, please point me in the right direction (offlist
if required).

Paul

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Robinson" <ukcueman@xxxxxxx>
To: <ukha_d@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 1:03 PM
Subject: Re: [ukha_d] Mini itx in a HTPC?


> > Can you try a loss less Flac as well?
> Never heard of it before, but google is my friend :-)
>
> So I have:
>     server - EPIA M12000 running windows XP, 512MB RAM
>     source encoding: FLAC and WMA
>     slimp3 - I have two, although one is still in its box :-( I'll try
it with both one
> and two slimp3's running (on different sources)
>
> Any other requests?
>