Thanks for the insight. Yeah, unfortunately technological stagnation doesn't keep the economy flowing. Could a dual Tualatin 1.5 GHz, 4 GB system with HD 4000 can get any browser-based video acceleration in Linux?

My single-CPU system at 1575MHz can handle offline H.264 @ 720p without any hardware acceleration (the 6800GT AGP has a broken PureVideo implementation; it can't even do partial acceleration). CPU usage runs at around 65-95% depending scene complexity, but it's completely smooth. So offline 720p would be a piece of cake for a dual CPU system. You might even have enough raw power to do 1080p, or at least come close to it.

Years ago, when I still had this system connected to the internet, I'd sometimes download YouTube videos (via a browser extension) and play the 720p MP4 files in MPC-HC with an older version of CoreAVC. I'm not sure if YouTube still lets you download videos.

Just don't ever try surfing the net on a Core i7 or Ryzen. Trust me, the amazing responsiveness and issue-free 4K/60 video playback will make you never want to hook those ancient systems up to the Internet ever again. 😉

Offline H.264 doesn't intrigue me much these days, probably because my LCD television can stream all this stuff just fine. I have downloaded some Youtube videos and the Tualatin does seem to fare better with offline content.

I don't plan on buying a new computer anytime soon, so no fear of getting spoiled with modern tech.

Are you still on Tualatin? You do realize that a cheap 50-60$ CPU like the Pentium G5400 or the newly released Athlon 200GE will run circles around both the Tualatin and whatever GPU you have installed on such a machine, right?

another trick is to use VLC for youtube videos, if you copy the link and open on VLC must will play fine at 720P with CPU usage left to spare...
on the web browser... well, try 360P and be patient, the difference in resources usage is pretty amazing playing on the browser.

also old "XBMC" (kodi) with youtube extension might work well for streaming some videos.

not entirely relevant, but on the 4670 PCIE I had some problems running video acceleration, I think I got the better results on 7 x86 and using firefox the last time...
also I tested it with a Celeron 430 and P4 630, with the P4 it would work nicely for 720P60, 1080P30, whatever the 4670 could handle; but with the 430 even with the GPU acceleration it would struggle, it would jump to 100% CPU usage and then down again to normal levels (for GPU decoding) all the time... I think HT made the difference for that, exact same PC, just replace one CPU by the other.

but yes, video acceleration on these cards is tricky, you really need to test some different softwares or get a little lucky until you can get it working well for web browser.

Garrett W wrote:

Are you still on Tualatin? You do realize that a cheap 50-60$ CPU like the Pentium G5400 or the newly released Athlon 200GE will run circles around both the Tualatin and whatever GPU you have installed on such a machine, right?

Yep. Welcome to the forum!

SPBHM wrote:

another trick is to use VLC for youtube videos, if you copy the link and open on VLC must will play fine at 720P with CPU usage […]
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another trick is to use VLC for youtube videos, if you copy the link and open on VLC must will play fine at 720P with CPU usage left to spare...
on the web browser... well, try 360P and be patient, the difference in resources usage is pretty amazing playing on the browser.

also old "XBMC" (kodi) with youtube extension might work well for streaming some videos.

not entirely relevant, but on the 4670 PCIE I had some problems running video acceleration, I think I got the better results on 7 x86 and using firefox the last time...
also I tested it with a Celeron 430 and P4 630, with the P4 it would work nicely for 720P60, 1080P30, whatever the 4670 could handle; but with the 430 even with the GPU acceleration it would struggle, it would jump to 100% CPU usage and then down again to normal levels (for GPU decoding) all the time... I think HT made the difference for that, exact same PC, just replace one CPU by the other.

but yes, video acceleration on these cards is tricky, you really need to test some different softwares or get a little lucky until you can get it working well for web browser.

I didn't know VLC could play videos from a URL. I'll have to test that out. Does the latest VLC for XP require SSE2 or later?
Things change rapidly with online streaming videos. Perhaps there is some obscure software, or add-on, or whatever it may be which could get this working how I want it, but will it work in 2 years? Seems unlikely. I should probably add Win7 to one of my super dual Tualatin rigs for testing though. I'm working on seting up a beast of a system now with dual channel SDRAM and some crazy Ultra 320 RAID w/256MB cache configuration. It will be 146 GB x 2 in stripe, so plenty of space for all the OSes I want to load it with. Unfortunately, both HDDs have different firmwares, so I hope the RAID works.