Calling all MP New Zealanders (Both of you!!) (18 Viewers)

[shacknasty]

So what do you think Mcrae? Is there anything else besides PowerDVD 8, that I will need for DVB-T? Not keen on downloading stuff at 5kb/sec again tonight

 

[mcraenz]

I've not a got a DVB-T rig up and running at yet but yeah should be good with the codec. as long has you have h.264 hardware decoding on your gfx card.

 

[Bleazle]

@Bleazle i would recomend upgrading to dvi to hdmi and 1080p video output, and get DVB-T its fantastic! gotta love CSI in 1080i

Yeah - nah - not really keen on going down the DVB-T route yet.


DVI-HDMI leads are cheap so I might get one of those in the meantime anyway...

So if I'm going to stick with DVB-S for the moment will upgrading my video card to an HD card make any difference to my picture? The picture is fine at them moment but I have to use one of the zoom options to fill the screen because the "original" picture only fills around 3/4's of the screen (which I assume is due to the 720p output from the graphics card?). Will an HD capable card output an image that doesn't need to be zoomed in on? (Note: The card would have to be AGP based but from what I've found out so far there seems to be a reasonable number of HD/AGP cards available)

Cheers

 

[handya]

Bleazle if you upgrade ur card it will look beter as you can out put fill 1080p to ur tv meaning that it uses all the pixels, im not sure if it will make much differece to sat broadcast, but everything else will look beter, also get one that has hardware h.264 chip, so it will lower ur cpu

 

[Bleazle]

O.K., so I've Googled half the morning away and from what I can see the Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 512MB is a great card, but is it overkill for an HTPC system (which will never be used to play games..)? I was looking at the SAPPHIRE HD 2600XT but the reviews weren't all that great. The 3850 costs around $200 more but I'm not too worried about that as long as I'm getting the right card.

Any thoughts on my choice of card?....

 

[PHansen]

Do you need to buy a Radeon card? I got a second hand silent cooler Gigabyte 8600GT for $120 a few weeks ago, and i thought that it was overkill Even new 8600's are fairly cheap.

So long as you get something that has the h.264 decoding on chip then you'll be good. I'd tend to shy away from lower end cards though as they have next to no resale value in the short term, let alone the long term.

 

[handya]

i dont know much about graphics cards, but i would recomend something that has purevideo hd as it has on board h.264 decoding.

 

[PHansen]

Purevideo is an Nvidia based product so to use it you have to have an Nvidia based card. The thing is that you need an Nvidia card with a G92 or newer based core to take best advantage of it.

Check this PDF out here for a list of cards that support h.264 decoding.
http://www.nvidia.com/docs/CP/11036/PureVideo_Product_Comparison.pdf

And this for a bit of a write up about the 8600's decoding abilities.
AnandTech: NVIDIA GeForce 8600: Full H.264 Decode Acceleration

 

[Bleazle]

As far as I can tell there isn't an Nvidia based card with H.264 decoding (i.e. 8600XX) available for AGP. Plus I've had problems with the latest Nvidia drivers not playing AVI files which is a real pain in the #@!#! Still I guess I could have the same problems with an ATI based card such as the 3850 - this stuff does my head in! Maybe I should do some work to take my mind off it..

 

[mcraenz]

Yeah I think I know what the problem is. I think this will require a patch! Priority is not observed when grabbing EPG. What is happening here is that it is using the DVB-T card to grab that EPG, which is successful , problem is that it only contains Now&Next.

So we need an option to completely disable EPG grabbing on a specific card or maybe disable EPG grabbing for a specific tuning detail tuning detail. I'll have a think about it and see if I can't write and submit a patch.

Hi mcraenz,

any luck with this? It would be a major plus if this could work.

Happy to test if needed.

Thanks
Damian

Patch has been committed to SVN
EPG grabbing for a card can be enabled/disabled by editing the properties of a DVB card. It will be in the next build but not sure when that will be due to the release of RC1.



@Bleazle:
I've not seen confirmation that h.264 hardware decoding can be done on any AGP card, even ones that supposedly support it e.g. 2400XT etc. I'm not saying it won't work but I've just seen several people asking about it and there seemed to be some doubt around the subject. However this doesn't affect you AT ALL since you're not planning to go to DVB-T, (Unless you're planning blueray?) I'd say you're not going to get anything extra by upgrading your video card, not when you're only playing MPEG2 off DVB-S. I'm sure what ever video card you have it must be more than capable of running your TV at it's native resolution, try DVI to HDMI, although I've heard some people have had more luck getting 1:1 pixel mapping using the VGA input on there HD TVs, depends on the TV though. I think some TV's tend to overscan HDMI