completely newbie needs your help (1 Viewer)

[animus]

hiya

i am thinkin for building up my very own htpc and before i do that i am considering of trying out the softwares like
mediaportal or xbmc

I use a 17" laptop that is 3 years old (4 in july) and i was watching movies and other staff with it.Now i am thinkin of buyin a desktop to act as a htpc/internet combo.As i searched about it i found out that there is no need for high end systems.which is like big big plus for my wallet.

Since i know that i am tryin on those sofwares one of which is mediaportal.

I am new to media centers but not to video players.My current set up (as software) is (for x264 videos)

Player: Kmplayer
Codec :Core AVC (pro version,pirated kill me!!)
Renderer:Overlay renderer.

works like a charm.No tearing or studdering what so ever.

I have a nvidia geforce 8600m gs video card.Which in his web site says has purevideo but i dont know the generation.There is some tech called Cuda which gives coreavc an edge (less cpu use)

Here is my configration (i took it from my post in some other forum to take care of the tearing problem found out just needed to change the renderer to overlay from vmr9 but still the same configration) if you need hardware specifications.


my configration

Codec packs

CCCP + CoreAVC (disabled cccp's x264 decoder)

Players

Kmplayer (avc and cccp all set up)

MPC (Same here) (media player classic)


My OS

Windows 7 ultimate + Service Pack 1 (64 bit)


My Laptop's Spesifications


Intel Core2Duo CPU T7700 @2.40 GHz (4M Cache, 2.40 GHz, 800 MHz FSB)

Video Card :NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GS (monitor working at 60 hz)

Video Card Specifications (taken from nvidia official site)

Stream Processors 16
Core Clock (MHz) 600
Shader Clock (MHz) 1200
Memory Clock (MHz) 700
Maximum Memory 512MB
Memory Interface 128-bit

(I know its a sh..y card but it should play at least 720p's without problems)

Ram : DDR2 3GB (dont know the hz its again 3 years old probably around 533 hz)

The Hard drives

Hitachi HTS5452....(i dont know the specifications really but its again 3 year old hard drive probably either sata or sata 2)


You are probably wondering

"what the fresh hell is the question?"
:sorry:
As i said and declared on the title i am a complete newbie.


The question is is there a possiblity of using these settings (coreavc+overlay) (gives me good results i dont know) in media portal?


As i looked into the media centers s for these kind of things i found out that xbmc does not use external codecs what so ever.So no coreavc there.

There lays a problem.For my movies and TV shows (mostly itunes 720p rips) i can pretty much say anything i have is in mkv ext.

And after further investigation of mediaportal for codec packs and staff.I found about SAF.As i can understand SAF is like cccp or klite for MediaPortal.Like A codec pack.Which contains FFDshow DVXA (which has hardware acceleration but i dont know if it will work with my gpu or even stable).And i hate using codec packs since its filled with staff i barely use.

The second question is

Does ffdshow DVXA has a good performance in nvidia gpus? Should i replace CoreAVC with new FFDshow.And how to configure SAF and mediaportal (installed mediaportal tried to configure it for coreavc i have didnt worked.possibly because i dont know anything about codecs in mediaportal) (followed the how to for saf) should install saf's latest version.Where can i find it.


A very important note i dont want to use any external PLAYERS (not codecs).All in one big happy family.

 

[mm1352000]

Hi and welcome animus!

Brief answers to your questions:


The question is is there a possiblity of using these settings (coreavc+overlay) (gives me good results i dont know) in media portal?

Yes, you can absolutely use CoreAVC. You may be interested to take a look at codec configuration in MediaPortal. As far as overlay goes, I think the answer there is no. We allow either VMR or EVR...

There lays a problem.For my movies and TV shows (mostly itunes 720p rips) i can pretty much say anything i have is in mkv ext.

No such problem for MP!
MediaPortal does allow you to play MKV. For that I think it is best to go with SAF.

And after further investigation of mediaportal for codec packs and staff.I found about SAF.As i can understand SAF is like cccp or klite for MediaPortal.Like A codec pack.Which contains FFDshow DVXA (which has hardware acceleration but i dont know if it will work with my gpu or even stable).And i hate using codec packs since its filled with staff i barely use.

I know what you mean. You can try and play MKVs without it, however I think the problem will be splitting the audio and video, for which the LAVF splitter would be useful. You can use the DxVA Checker (no install required) to determine whether your 8600m supports hardware acceleration...


Does ffdshow DVXA has a good performance in nvidia gpus? Should i replace CoreAVC with new FFDshow.And how to configure SAF and mediaportal (installed mediaportal tried to configure it for coreavc i have didnt worked.possibly because i dont know anything about codecs in mediaportal) (followed the how to for saf) should install saf's latest version.Where can i find it.

FFDShow should be fine on NVidian GPUs. Whether you should go with FFDShow or Core AVC would probably depend on whether your GPU supports hardware acceleration. Core AVC is probably the most efficient software decoder whereas FFDShow is probably the best free decoder with hardware acceleration. The latest version of SAF is SAF 6; you may want to stick with SAF 5...

A very important note i dont want to use any external PLAYERS (not codecs).All in one big happy family.

That can definitely be done with the right codec configuration.

mm