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I am going for vacation soon, and I am carrying a hard disk full of movies and a projector with me.

Our vacation home has an old AMD Athlon PC, running Windows XP. Average video memory. It's a year-2005 spec PC. Dunno specs as of now, I'll update the post when I get there.

SPECS AS PER MEMORY RECOLLECTION:

3 GHz AMD Athlon processor, single-core
1 GB RAM
64/128 MB AMD Onboard Graphics
Windows XP Professional.

The thing runs VLC media Player without hiccups, though I am half sure it won't do that with my movies-all of them are 1080p or 720p minimum.

Would the PC be able to play a 1080p movie?

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  • How can we answer this question without any specs? "Average video memory" doesn't really help. Right click and goto properties. What does it list for processor speed, memory, and video card?
    – Eric F
    Oct 2, 2014 at 17:34
  • I said I'm not near the PC right now. And as far as I can remember, it has a single core AMD Athlon CPU, 3 GhZ, a 128 MB AMD Onboard Graphics, about 1 GB RAM.
    – Mayukh Nair
    Oct 2, 2014 at 17:42
  • What sort of files are the videos? What codec do they use? What is the file extension?
    – music2myear
    Oct 2, 2014 at 17:46
  • I have a P4 3GHz with 2GB of RAM and XP Media Center chokes on 1080P movies, but plays 720P movies all day long. Suggestion: TRY IT.
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Oct 2, 2014 at 17:51
  • @music2myear MP4. 1080p/720p movies, ripped from Blu-Ray discs.
    – Mayukh Nair
    Oct 3, 2014 at 17:57

4 Answers 4

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Decoding video is not a memory intensive task, nor does it burden the video card very much. When it comes to merely playing videos, your only real concern is the CPU speed, and yours should be able to handle it.

If the OS is starved for RAM it could make a difference. But on a machine that old, I assume it's XP, and 1GB is fine for XP as long as it's not crapped up with junk software.

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Your CPU is just enough to play 720P videos on youtube. Considering that you have an onboard AMD IGP of that time, it may not be able to decode 1080p with it.

Other than that you can't go higher, except if you have an enough new GPU like an ATI HD 2400.

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It will be a little sluggish but will play. Your CPU speed should be alright, RAM will definitely be your biggest bottleneck for sure.

Also for your reference, someone else asked a similar question:

Minimum specs needed to run 1080p HD movies?

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I want to be honest and say that's a terrible computer. I doubt it will be a 'reasonable' experience in any case and recommend not bringing that paper weight.

You can easily replace that with another media center for under 100 bucks.

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