Comments on: Once again: Don’t do it

By: PeterStJ

PeterStJ — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 18:43:21 +0000

I found your blog searching for good music player/manager for the console as I only have old laptops (at home, at my parents and at work – all with 256RAM which is not enough for ‘modern’ distors) so years ago I returned to mostly using console apps (returned, as once I had only Pentium 133Mgz with 32MB of RAM and X started but was not usable with more than one application) but was missing a good music organizer/search utility.
I was very implressed with your obsession with old hardware and making it work and usable. I am not such a tech savvy but I am an ecologist and I am very impressed with people trying to use their area of expertise to help out the planet as best as they can. So thank you for your blogging efforts. Thanks to it I have also found a few apps I have not encountered before (like charm – instead I was using vim scripts to blog).
As of the purchase of new electronics and especially computers – I know the chores, I am faced with the fake need of ‘new’ every once in a while and often people argue that the new models are better, because they use less power. Well, here is the thing, most laptops and other electornic goods take more energy to be manufactured and transported than what they will take for the entier period of usage, especially if they are to be considered obsolete as per the standard these days – up to 3 years.
I have been happily using my machines for the last 7 years and I can easily see me using those for at least 5 more providing nothing on the components fail. I have even blogged about it: http://malwkgad.livejournal.com/230300.html

By: Dmitry

Dmitry — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 11:02:39 +0000

I bought my new laptop last Christmas. But simply because old one had major problems with HDD, so I did not want to take a risk to be left without laptop.
As a result, both HDDs (new and old) crashed this year. New laptop was warranty one, so they replaced HDD. Though, I had to keep backup somewhere.
Now I have 2 laptops: new one and old one, both with replaced HDDs.
And, as a joke, new laptop does not work with any Linux distro I have tried so far.

By: mulenmar

mulenmar — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 10:00:51 +0000

I should also mention that if you STILL can’t get decent playback, you can always recompile your own mplayer package. With your Pentium4-based Celeron CPU and your Atom CPU netbook, you should have SSE2 instructions (check /proc/cpuinfo to be sure) available. When taken advantage of, multimedia performance is GREATLY increased over even the i686-compiled packages available in Arch Linux.

By: mulenmar

mulenmar — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 09:54:52 +0000

My first thought on seeing this was, “You’re kidding me.” Then I thought, “Of course, most video I play these days is only 480p at the most, so I shouldn’t judge so fast.”

My laptop, with a Pentium 3 850MHz CPU, just 384 MB PC100 RAM, and an ATI Mobility M3 can play H.264 and VP8 video just fine, and it’s from 2001. Just pass mplayer the “-vo xv” flag, so it uses the XVideo hardware acceleration option and frees up the CPU from much of the video decoding and display. Perhaps throw in the “-framedrop” option too if you need to.

With those options, I have no problems playing 480p videos. For 720p, I might occaisionally need to play with the “nice” command to smooth out playback a bit, like so:

sudo nice -n -10 su mulenmar -c “mplayer Videos/My_video -vo xv”

Replace with your user name and video, of course.

It also helps to make sure your video driver and XServer have enabled DRI. At the bottom of my xorg.conf, for example, I add

Section “DRI”
Mode 0666
EndSection

Enjoy.

By: zenfunk

zenfunk — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 09:29:35 +0000

Try mplayer with (hard-) framedropping activated. The frame drops are not noticeable at all (unless you try a HD movie on your PII probably), and you get no audio lag and stuff. In practice it means a big performance boost for movie playback.

By: damaged justice

damaged justice — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:54:40 +0000

Z80 based, homebrew hardware and software:

http://www.retroleum.co.uk/electronics-articles/previous/

I’d buy new hardware if those cheap, efficient netbooks existed that we were promised. But it’s a lie, like cake or flying cars. Told to keep us complacent so we keep buying terahertz crotch-burners, and thinking it’s perfectly acceptable for a so-called “portable computing device” to have a battery life of less than 24 hours.

By: Bob Anderson

Bob Anderson — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 17:07:44 +0000

I have an Atom netbook with the lousy gma950 chipset and can watch 720p videos in mplayer/vlc, hw-accelerated and all. Avatar and CGI movies in general benefit from the added resolution.. even on a 1024×600 screen

By: Linuxbakkie

Linuxbakkie — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 09:29:12 +0000

I agree with you, nowadays it seems that the old pc’s (or laptops) doesn’t work after x-mas.

By: seidos

seidos — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 02:40:27 +0000

i watch all my media on this 13″ toshiba. 1.47Ghz duo core 2GB ram. works fine for me. no hi def television.

By: Celsius1414

Celsius1414 — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 22:23:32 +0000

Darn-it, I should have seen that. Thanks.

My excuse is NaNoWriMo.