Upgrade to support HDTV, HDDVD & Blu-Ray

[bluenadas]

I'm ready to go for HDTV, BlueRay/HD-DVD

[bakra]

@deebo: I know there are powerfull mini-ITX board, but the big difference is the price! With this HW decoder you can use a less powerfull (so cheaper) mini-ITX board. (or in my case: I allready do have one). Of course it depends on the price of the HW decoder if this will be a cheaper solution.

[dman_lfc]

Originally Posted by bakra

@deebo: I know there are powerfull mini-ITX board, but the big difference is the price! With this HW decoder you can use a less powerfull (so cheaper) mini-ITX board. (or in my case: I allready do have one). Of course it depends on the price of the HW decoder if this will be a cheaper solution.

Indeed you could have a mini device and stream content to it even HDTV with TVServer eventually ;-)

DMAN

[bakra]

Yes, that's what I mean. That will be great. Of course it will also be great to put one in my main MediaPortal system, because this one has only a 1,7 GHz Celeron.
Then HDTV will be an option on this one too. What will be the price (more or less) of this HW-decoder?

[McSeven]

I have a 660 EUR overall cost hardware (low profile) that can decode 1080p h264 with ffdshow at 20% cpu load. 720p for my projector is decoded at ~7%. and it's quiet, too (asus "p5ld2 vm" mainboard). So no need for such a card here...

[McSeven]

@bakra: upgrade to a recent intel dualcore cpu. my p4 3,4GHz cant decode h264 skippyless, but a 2.400MHz dualcore does.... AND comsumes less power.

[markrb]

My current machine is capable. I built it with Hi-Def in mind.
The Nvidia 8600 already has hardware acceleration for hi-def.

I agree with those that say a software solution would best serve them.

In the short term better integration with PowerDVD 7.3 would work for me.

Thanks,
Mark

[joboehl]

I'am very interested in this topic. After a couple of years of Vivo and PureVideo promisses, I have a hard time buying their speech again. Add to that the history of bad drivers and focus primarelly on other areas (like gaming). I need to wait and see if and how they survive the hype.

As far as marketing goes, even the onboard 6150 should be able to accelerate decoding of HiDef content. Try to do that and you will see.

Other thing is tha the main HD-DVD and BD devices don't use those chips but other decoder chips (like Sigma and Broadcomm). Maybe Faroudja for example could come up with chips to either decode or enhance the picture quality. If those would be available to handle the video on a PC, it would be terrific.

But, there are other issues. For example, witch SW decoder would fully utilize the resources? Are we talking about using MPV for decoding with this acceleration? HW solution is good, but if no good software is available to leverage it's power, the overall solution would be compromised. And HDCP content protection? If an upgrade is needed anyway for HDCP, investing on two pieces of hardware would not be a good approach.

Anyway I think the idea is excelent and see a lot of good use for it, even more if the HW could assist on encoding too. That would be awsome.

Count me in.

[RoyH]

Originally Posted by dman_lfc

Not if you have a hardware decoder pretty much any CPU & DirectX 9 capable card should be fine.

No it's got nothing to do with writing for Nvidia or ATI (AMD) graphics cards - currently this is handled by a supported software codec (using graphics card acceleration) and the HDCP rom on the graphics board. AACS is handled by the DVD or Blu-ray navigator which is something we'll have to look at though. Instead of using Cyberlink or Intervideo decoders you'll use the hardware decoders decoder which is 100% DirectShow capable thus allowing any DirectShow app to work.

Yes we want to avoid this also. Once a navigator is sorted for MediaPortal this should be more possible. It's early days yet. An option is also that the cards will output video using a HDMI port (HDCP capable).

Thanks everyone for you feedback - it's appreciated.

DMAN

Ok

That means you must write software for the internal player, figure out how to deal with AACS (which when used officially must be payed for cause its licensed i believe) and you will accociate Mediaportal with one particular piece of hardware to watch HDDVD/BLURAY from within the mediaportal shell, instead of Mediaportal being a software solution solely.

I dont think this is good strategy, especially the hardware part, because the hardware part and CPU offloading is already taken care of with having a reasonable CPU and a 8500/8600 Nvidia card or the coming ATI cards.

If you like a small box HTPC with for example a MiniITX MB you dont want an extra PCI card in there, do you?

So in my opinion the two best possible strategy's for watching HDDVD/Bluray from within Mediaportal are:

Internal Player
-to figure out how to use AACS in the internal player's navigator and figure out how to use the HW-accelaration from Nvidia/ATI.

External Player within internal mediaportal-shell:
-use, for example, Powerdvd in a Mediaportal coating like MyMovies 2.3 does for MCE. The dev from MyMovies already stated once on his forum he wouldn't mind MyMovies being ported to other applications like Mediaportal.

Just my 2 cents, please discuss.

[Flerbizky]

I need a BD / HDDVD combo drive... Apart from that, I'm good to go...

Though I will be upgrading to an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ 65w with a HD Audio capable mainboard. Mostly because that and 2Gb of ram will use less power than my current 3200+ with 1 gig (and crappy audio)...

Not that it matters much though. My TV Server has been put into operation today - and I'm the happiest camper in the building :-)