New use for an old computer (1 Viewer)

[go_mustangs]

Frustrated with paying for tv I rarely watch I have been on quest to "cut the cord" on cable. I've done some research and that's how I ended up here. I have an e-machines t6536 athlon 64 3800+ 2.4 GHz 2 gb ram PC that is running windows XP MCE. I have added added a nvidia 210 and I have installed mediaportal and gone through some of the plug ins and settings. I'm unsure as to what codec's to install. I know my machine is underpowered and wanted suggestions as to what codecs to use. My main use will be as an online pvr. I will not be recording any live tv. Live tv will be ota hdtv with my antena. Thanks in advance for any help you can lend.

 

[HomeY]

Hi, and welcome to the forum

Personally i'm a big favor of the LAVFilters (which you can easily install by using the MediaPortal Extension Installer (MPEI)).

You can find more info about codecs in the Wiki section, which you can find here.

If you have more (specific) questions about codecs, you can also check out the specific form for that, which can be found here.

Good luck!

 

[hairlesshobo]

Welcome to the neighborhood!

I agree with HomeY, the LAVfilters work very well and do not seem to be too much of a resource hog.

On a side note, that machine you are running isn't THAT under powered. Take a look at the specs in my signature of my bedroom client, it's right around the same specs as yours but with a lower speed video card. The one in my bedroom can play anything I want, including Blurays so you shouldn't have any problem being able to make that system do what you want. Just make sure that you clean anything else off of it so that precious resources are not being wasted by other applications (definitely no antivirus type applications). Just my $.02.

Good luck!

-Steve

 

[hafblade]

The only real resource hungry thing in htpcs imho is HD videos (especially interlaced once) and the graphical user interface with large database plugins.

My fathers bedroom pc is a small atom pc with on board graphics. He watching sd tv & videos with it and has no problems. At the beginning everything was really slow until we setup his resolution in windows to 1280x720 (from 1920x1080). Now the gui runs like a sharm even with movingpictures and mptvseries addons and a large database. When he tries to watch hd it's not running fast enough but sd is fine.

With this pc resolution was the key

 

[go_mustangs]

Thank you for the great replies, very encouraging.

It looks like this set up is very similar to mine

http://khromov.wordpress.com/2009/0...edia-center-using-windows-xp-and-mediaportal/

The crucial part of his system was the use of the CoreAVC codec. Do you believe LAVfilters would yield better results than CoreAVC in my situation.

Thanks Again