Upgrade to support HDTV, HDDVD & Blu-Ray

[dman_lfc]

Originally Posted by RoyH

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.

Who said anything about MediaPortal only supporting one piece of hardware for this?

Originally Posted by RoyH

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.

It's a good strategy if you don't already have this hardware in place. If you have a higher spec'd HTPC then just stick to software & GPU acceleration if it's any good. The poll suggests people would need to upgrade or look to a h/w decoding solution thus suggesting something like this is worth investigating further.
This h/w decoding solution can handle two streams at a time so take into consideration transcoding in the background whilst watching TV. I don't think the GPU could do that in parrallel.

Originally Posted by RoyH

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

It's a user choice. We're not forcing people to buy it just gauging the market for acceptance of such a solution.

Originally Posted by RoyH

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.

HW-acceleration in current codecs is easy. AACS is not, however if we can leverage something we will however it may not be free.
Ideally an integrated player is the prefered option. I hope we can get there.

DMAN

[dman_lfc]

Originally Posted by 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?

I hope to have an estimate next week.
What would you be willing to pay

DMAN

[dman_lfc]

Originally Posted by joboehl

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..

I googled Faroudja. Maybe to high end and force the price too high. Lets start with the basics first ;-)

Originally Posted by joboehl

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.

The decoder will have nothing to do with MPV etc. It will have it's own directshow decoders leveraging the hardware capabilities. Nice de-interlacing etc - yummy. HDCP protection is whats delaying this. I'm thinking or a Lite board without HDCP and a Pro version with HDMI or DVI (&SPDIF) out which has HDCP... soo many options...

Originally Posted by joboehl

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.

Encoding is under consideration - how would you use it?

DMAN

[Spragleknas]

I voted before the info on homepage was available (voted [1] - should have voted [3]). Thought the poll was about what I thought i HAD to do - not what I would like to do....). Sorry.

[spenca]

Originally Posted by dman_lfc

Hi All,

I'm trying to gather some information about some hardware projects i'm involved in.
You as a user of MediaPortal and part of this fine community I hope you can help me out.

So my question to you is in the form of this poll.
Please consider answering as best you can.
If you need further clarification then please don't hesitate to ask.

Please take into consideration that your CPU% should be as low as possible and I'm sure you want a quiet system too.

Many thanks for your support.

dman,

pci/pcie hardware decoder card sounds nice, but what i know all newer graphics cards have hardware h.264 decoding build in. nvidias commercial h.264 driver is cheaper than every hardware decoder i know, isn't it?

/spenca

[BoelShit]

I'd go for a pci card if the price is right... I got 3 pc's set up at home for MP and they are all older pc's which are capable of playing anything except full HD 1080P.
I dont want to spend a lot on buying completely new hardware if there is a cheaper alternative (around €100).

[Tech Geek]

The one thing this poll leaves out is what exactly "cost effective" means.
My new 1650 graphics card was $50 after rebate and my 1950GT was just under $100 after rebate.

The OEM 3400+ I bought to upgrade my system was $35 and I'm not even sure I needed it if I use something besides MediaPortal.

Considering that... cost effective should = cheap, and I'd rather use the card slot for an additional tuner. Besides, you need a certain level of graphics hardware no matter what.

[dman_lfc]

Originally Posted by spenca

dman,

pci/pcie hardware decoder card sounds nice, but what i know all newer graphics cards have hardware h.264 decoding build in. nvidias commercial h.264 driver is cheaper than every hardware decoder i know, isn't it?

/spenca

Nvidia doesn't have a H.264 decoder it relies currently on Cyberlink, Intervideo and such. So you have to buy a new card + the software licence to play the content at least. Sometimes two differing codecs from two differing software applications - messy. The Nvidia VP2 engine does not accelerate VP1 well nor MPEG-4 container formats.

DMAN

[dman_lfc]

Originally Posted by Tech Geek

The one thing this poll leaves out is what exactly "cost effective" means.
My new 1650 graphics card was $50 after rebate and my 1950GT was just under $100 after rebate.

The OEM 3400+ I bought to upgrade my system was $35 and I'm not even sure I needed it if I use something besides MediaPortal.

Considering that... cost effective should = cheap, and I'd rather use the card slot for an additional tuner. Besides, you need a certain level of graphics hardware no matter what.

You're forgetting the codec / player costs too.
I don't know the cost yet but I'll let you'll know soon.

DMAN

[BugsBunny]

This remembers me of the Creative Dxr3 DVD Decoder
http://www.alibaba.com/catalog/10836...th_TV_Out.html
Back in time when DVD Playback started on the PC, many PCs were not powerful enough to playback mpeg2.
The card had a rather short time on the market because soon PCs were powerful enough to handle mpeg2 playback.

My Core2Duo E6600 + CoreAVC handles the HDTV transport streams nicely. I upgraded from an athlon XP 1800. My new system now even consumes less power then my old athlon.

What about the power consumption of such an add on card?