I recently reinstalled windows 7 on this PC, but the video playback is terrible even at 360p for Youtube etc... Very very slow with dropping frames using an old AGP Nvidia MX4000 card.

If I install a linux OS, will it work for viewing online video so as to be watchable? At 480p? at 1080p? Or is it a hopeless idea.

Is this the original Prescott Pentium 4, or the Prescott 2M? The former is 32-bit, which limits your choice. I've watched video on a Pentium M laptop, so the problem is probably the graphics. You can still download a Linux driver for the MX4000 from Nvidia:
MX4000 driver

I suggest you try MX Linux. It's lightweight, available in a 32-bit version, and has a tool for installing Nvidia drivers.

480p yes, 1080p very doubtful. What you can do, a workaround, is to set the screen size as small as possible, then play that big video with
That will play the video full screen, which is actually smaller than the video, and it will play.
This video device supports 720x400. You can probably set the screen to that size, then play that larger video full screen, and it will play.

Then it depends on the video codec. xvid will play ok, x264 needs more horsepower, HEVC won't play on that at all.

So to answer your question. When you get utube videos, get format 18.
That thing is dated. Also it's 32 bit.

IT is a 32 bit CPU only.
Do they still develop for linux 32 bit?

yes 32 bit, does that mean no new linux mint, ubuntu etc.. can install?
I was able to find XP drivers for the MX4000 and they installed ok in windows 7

windows7 is tolerable on it, except for videos, and thing is I tried a x1300 pro AGP AMD video card and while menus where quicker opening, the video had absolutely no improvement on playback.

I got rid of a slightly older 3.0GHz Pentium 4 Northwood because it could not play Youtube videos at any resolution. I think the codec expected too much.

Slackware and Debian still support 32-bit machines. They should be usable with the lighter desktop environments if your computer has at least 1GB of memory.
Ed

has 2GB ram.
I resolved the problems with youtube and other things too.
I had 3 bad devices for what I was doing with thios old PC.
first off the SATA 320gb HDD was super slow, I cloned it onto a 1 TB SATA drive, big boost in performance of basic vunctions like opening file manager, getting properties, insteas of many seconds became instant etc...

second, I found my AMD HD2500 AGP 256mb video card and installed the driver from ATI website for it (XP-Vista), solved the video playback off line.

third, I have an add on 1gb PCI Ethernet card plugged into the buss, and was using that, but it kept slowing down youtube videos (wheeling circles)
I plugged into the 100mb ethernet port on the mainboard, and that fixed the internet video.

So it is working real good now on windows 7, and I bet a linux OS would work just perfect on here made for 32 bit.

I dont know about the AMD HD2500 video card though. What is the state of linux drivers on that old card?

I am thinking now it is worth getting a SATA SSD for this, just a small one. I have 6 other much newer PC, this one is like a simple game PC for the grandkids who are 3, 5,6 yrs old.

The rest of your system may be up to the task but I suspect your biggest problem will be finding a driver for the Nvidia card. The MX4000 came out in 2003 (I still have an old AGP MX440 from '02 laying around here somewhere for some reason) and I'd bet that Nvidia is not making drivers that work with recent distributions. I'm not sure if the nouveau driver works with cards of that vintage. I know that the proprietary driver I used for the Geforce 210 that replaced my old MX440 is no longer supported---at least not with the 5.3.18 kernel. I'd bet that a card that's 6-7 years older than the 210 will be up the same creek.

I see that you found an AMD solution for your playback problem. Good work. That's still a fairly old card, though.

Cheers...

Linux includes drivers for ATI/AMD graphics cards. It should just work.
Ed

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/
https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html
https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answ...ail/a_id/3142/

MX 4000 is in the NV10 family (Celsius), (NV 18)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#AMD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ocessing_units

I gave up on the Emachine with MSI-7104 (PM8M) board for now, and went with an Intel server board 875 chipset and a Pentium 4 3.2ghz cpu with 3gb and the AGP HD2600 PRO and a Sata 1TB drive.

https://www.cnet.com/products/intel-...ket-478-i875p/

I also found that for windows 7, you need to make sure the windows service 'Application Management' is running as for some reason watchng youtube tends to peg the cpu usage up to 100%.

I have another exact same board with an NX6200AX AGP card to also play with.
It seems to me these intel server boards are better quality.

I put MXLinux on a twin motherboard with a Geforce 6200 video card to test the youtube playback
And it is no better than when it runs windows 7, cant run 480P but can run 360P

I have 2 server intel boards here s875wp1-e, one has a HD 2600 Pro, other has Nvidia 6200.
These are AGP boards.
The board with the HD 2600 can run 720P youtube video ok. But not 1080P, which it halts and stutters.

Something about online youtube video is hard to play on weak PC. Netflix has same issue.

I can watch Netflix on the PC with the HD 2600 card.

Apparently the PC chokes on processing video, and the CPU gets involved.

Here is a 3D Marks report running windows7 and the HD 2600 AGP, and the PC can run Crysis video game, I downloaded a demo.

The PC with the nvidia 6200 card has a 3dMarks score of 5200.

Attached Thumbnails

 

Well yah, the hardware is not up to the decoding/decompressing power needed to play these modern high bitrate, high compression, high resolution videos.

Plus how fast is the AGP bus compared to PCIe?

You sound like you are surprised by this fact. Really?

The Geforce 6200 is NV40 family
https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html
Nvidia dropped support for that years ago.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/

You may be able to use it with an older version of Xorg. Why are you using such old hardware? Is that all that you can get or afford? That old hardware will not play modern videos.

Have you tried what I posted in #3? That may allow you to play larger videos. Or, if you play 480p videos on a 720x400 or 640x480 screen, they won't look so bad.

You can get a 3rd gen i5, with 8GB Ram, 1TB hardrive, modern video hardware, modern PCIe bus, for $120-$150 on newegg right now. If you watch you can get free shipping.

The youngsters think that a 3rd gen is ancient and don't want them.

You can also get them on craigslist if you watch. I've seen them on craigslist, an i7 4790, 4th gen, 24GB RAM, Geforce 710, 1TB hard drive, keyboard/mouse, for $100.

That's the way to buy used puters. That i7 will last you for 8 more years perhaps.

I have 5 decently powerful 4 and 2 core CPU more modern PCs working ok.
This old pentium 4 is something I have owned for years and decided if I could figure out some things. It seems to me the only way for it to work decently today is with more powerful AGP cards, which cost too much money still for a 32 bit system. The HD 2600 I have is ok. You can get better AGP cards than that one.

It gets much easier when you play the videos without a browser.
E.g. mpv can do that.