This past week I tried watching an on-demand movie from Amazon.com with the PC that I have connected to my TV (see previous post). I found out that Amazon has a much higher hardware requirement than I expected. My system has an 866 Mhz P3 processor and the video was so choppy that I had to switch to my P4 3.0 Ghz system in order to view the movie. After looking around on the Amazon site, I found that their minimum requirement is a P4 2.33 Ghz system! I am able to watch most movies on Hulu.com without too much trouble. Although there is some slowdown in frame rate. The bottom line is that processor speed is just as important as your Internet speed when it comes to on-demand video.
I added 256 MB of ram from Computer Memory Outlet.com, which bumped up the ram from 384 to 640. Computer Memory Outlet had the most reasonably priced 256MB PC133 memory that I could find. That made Internet Explorer run noticably faster, but did nothing to speed up the video frame rates. My advice would be to use at least Amazon's minimum requirements if you are thinking about building an on-demand Internet movie box.
I added 256 MB of ram from Computer Memory Outlet.com, which bumped up the ram from 384 to 640. Computer Memory Outlet had the most reasonably priced 256MB PC133 memory that I could find. That made Internet Explorer run noticably faster, but did nothing to speed up the video frame rates. My advice would be to use at least Amazon's minimum requirements if you are thinking about building an on-demand Internet movie box.
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