@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, i dont get the reason for the poll, if you want to watch HDDVD of BLURAY you need to meet the minimal hardware requirement, be it a dualcore CPU or an CPU offloading GPU. Anyone that does not own this already must upgrade, not?
Not if you have a hardware decoder pretty much any CPU & DirectX 9 capable card should be fine.
Also, to get things straight, do i understand correctly that you are developing an internal player for mediaportal that can take advantage of the hardware decoding capabilities of the Nvidia 8500/8600 gpu or the coming ATI gpu AND is capable of handling HDCP and AACS?
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.
If so im very excited cause right now im using PDVD7.3 Ultra as an external player for DVD HDDVD and BLURAY, and i dont like the fact that i cant use Mediaportal as the only GUI.
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