Video playback problem solved

[Walter Dnes]

  Several days ago, I was trying to solve the problem of stuttering
video playback on an older Dell (manufactured August 2007), on which I
had just installed Gentoo.  The PC wasn't capable of handling 1080i
streaming video from my HDHomerun TV tuner.  The answer did *NOT*
involve getting a video card.  I finally discovered the solution, after
an incredible saga of thud and blunder...

* the Gentoo x86 install CD must use lowest-common-denominator basic
  i686 instructions, in order to work on every x86 machine.  That's what
  the CD puts on the machine during the install process.  That very
  basic code doesn't have sse2, sse3 (aka pni), ssse3, and various other
  advanced instructions.  Decoding video streams is a heavy-duty number
  crunching job, and the CPU couldn't do it with one arm tied behind its
  back.

* when I emerged system and world (i.e. rebuilt the OS and programs),
  all the source code was compiled with the CFLAGS that I specified.
  Now, the machine not only handles 1080i using the onboard Intel GPU,
  it handles 1080p flawlessly.  I downloaded a short 1080p video clip
  from Youtube to test on, because my 5-megabit ADSL connection couldn't
  stream it realtime.

  So yes, Gentoo's optimization does make a difference.  The onboard
GPU shows up in lspci as...

"Intel Corporation 82G33/G31 Express Integrated Graphics Controller"

and the cpu is a Core2 (*NOT* a Core2 Duo) with 2 cores that show up
under /proc/cpuinfo as...

vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 15
model name      : Genuine Intel(R) CPU            2140  @ 1.60GHz
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 1595.987
cache size      : 1024 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2

  A 4+ year old system is saved from the scrap heap.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
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