Upgrade to support HDTV, HDDVD & Blu-Ray (3 Viewers)

If you were planning to upgrade your HTPC to support HDTV, HDDVD & Blueray would you

  • Need to upgrade the CPU, Motherboard, Memory & Graphics Card

    Votes: 218 29.9%
  • I would just need to upgrade my PCIe x16 Graphics Card

    Votes: 167 22.9%
  • I would consider looking for a cost effective PCI hardware decoding solution.

    Votes: 276 37.9%
  • I would consider looking for a cost effective PCIe x1 hardware decoding solution.

    Votes: 213 29.2%
  • Other - please state in reply.

    Votes: 51 7.0%

  • Total voters
    729

dman_lfc

Retired Team Member
  • Premium Supporter
  • July 28, 2004
    1,772
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    New Zealand New Zealand
    Got some samples I can download anywhere for me to test :)
    30 second clip should do it.

    DMAN

    Sent you a PM with a link, i care about my bw :)
    Im gonna try getting my 1900xt decode this again to...

    Yup works nice 5% CPU with H/W decoder, 50% without. ;)

    DMAN
     

    D.K

    Portal Member
    December 25, 2006
    6
    0
    Got some samples I can download anywhere for me to test :)
    30 second clip should do it.

    DMAN

    Sent you a PM with a link, i care about my bw :)
    Im gonna try getting my 1900xt decode this again to...

    Yup works nice 5% CPU with H/W decoder, 50% without. ;)

    DMAN

    ohhh intresting!
    wonder what system spec's i would need when using that card :D
    My so called "HTPC" isn't that much of a muscle machine :)
     

    D.K

    Portal Member
    December 25, 2006
    6
    0
    Im mostly intrested in something helping me decode x264 1080p files.
    I have a ATI Radeon 1900XT card that suports somekind of aceleration, but i cant get it to work with x264 files :confused:

    Now if this suggestion would help me i would be highly intrested :)

    best current solution for decoding x264 is Fast CPU if you are using ffdshow decoder. or a medium dual core if you are using CoreAVC decoder.

    Yeah, looked around for a a solution to the 1900xt decoding and found nothing.
    Found ALOT of post since the end of 2005 talking about this, but none seem to have got it anywere :(

    Just HD-DVD and BluRay is suported in Nero Showtime :(
     

    raxtor

    Portal Member
    April 25, 2007
    17
    0
    Home Country
    Netherlands Netherlands
    Laptop as a HTPC

    ... so there's not much I can upgrade on that. Having said that, the current laptop is a Dell D820 with a C2D processor and NVidia Quadro GPU, so I'll be all right for now.
     

    walkerx

    Portal Pro
    November 20, 2006
    67
    2
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    my mobo is hdtv ready - has built in hdmi, svideo, dvi and svga

    only thing is i don't have an hdtv as of yet, but as prices are dropping may get one within the next 6 months
     

    funkstar

    Retired Team Member
  • Premium Supporter
  • August 9, 2005
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    I've been reading on another forum about the ATI HD2400 and HD2600 cards. They all support hi-def decoding using MPEG-2, VC-1 and h.264.

    Although 3D persofmance varies between the 2400 and 2600, the hi-def decoding is the same. Basic, passive PCI-E cards are available from under £40.

    For me this would mean a change of motherboard however.
     

    Geon106

    Portal Pro
    June 23, 2006
    164
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    35
    Kent, England
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    my 6600GTOC has PureVideo so ready for HD. I'm already running in 1080p on my 32" HDTV and everything including games run fine, however, WMV HD movies playback terribly but thats due to me running on a 1.8Ghz Sempron, i shall soon upgrade to a 3700+ AMD 64 and possibly a new graphics card(probs a 7600GT PCI-E)

    My TV Tuner is already HDTV enabled.


    I will when the price comes down, get a blu-ray rewriter drive.
     

    knutinh

    Portal Pro
    September 4, 2005
    558
    2
    Isnt video-accelerator boards kind of outdated now?

    Nvidia and ATI are bringing mid-end GPUs with dedicated silicon to h264 decoding. This will probably be easier integrated to the renderer, and only one-way internal bandwidth is used - on a PCI x16 bus.

    Also, GPUs are featuring more general, programmable logic that surely will be exploited in futurecodecs.

    ATIs 2x00 have the benefit of integrated audio. This means that audio and video runs on the same hw clock, and that band-aids like Reclock should be a thing of the past.

    -k
     

    Geon106

    Portal Pro
    June 23, 2006
    164
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    Kent, England
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    Isnt video-accelerator boards kind of outdated now?

    Nvidia and ATI are bringing mid-end GPUs with dedicated silicon to h264 decoding. This will probably be easier integrated to the renderer, and only one-way internal bandwidth is used - on a PCI x16 bus.

    Also, GPUs are featuring more general, programmable logic that surely will be exploited in futurecodecs.

    ATIs 2x00 have the benefit of integrated audio. This means that audio and video runs on the same hw clock, and that band-aids like Reclock should be a thing of the past.

    -k

    I personally prefer to have a seperate soundcard to take the strain of audio. I love my soundcard as it has digital/optical outputs and what not and is gold plated.
     

    knutinh

    Portal Pro
    September 4, 2005
    558
    2
    I personally prefer to have a seperate soundcard to take the strain of audio. I love my soundcard as it has digital/optical outputs and what not and is gold plated.

    But do you prefer the audiophile gold plated stuff even if it gets you worse A/V quality?

    Using the PC hardware model, there is no way (AFAIK) to synchronise the audio and video card clocks. Whats worse, the cards are pulling data from system at their pace. As all man-made clocks drift, the a/v graph has three options:

    1. Do nothing, let each media card receive data at its pace, and observe lip-sync issues into the movie.

    2. Drop/replicate video frames whenever audio sync drifts far enough from video sync (this is what WMP does I believe)

    3. Resample audio so that the video clock is essentially master, and audio is massaged to slave to that. This will distort audio, especially if you are working on DD streams.

    I would prefer one or two HDMI connectors with 8 channels of 24bit/96kHz audio, running in sync with the video. Then my surround receiver is reduced to a DAC-unit with amplifiers, just the way Id like it.

    -k
     

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