Wird, p2p only HTPC (1 Viewer)

maniu

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December 30, 2006
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Okey, so i would like to set up something, i am from Poland and we really dont have any good shows or something, so i am getting everything from internet, oh and i dont have alot of money too:) so thats what i want to do,

I am going to buy samsungs 32" CRT HD TV, it comes here for something about 500$

pc:
my old 1200mhz AMD
old 256 rams
sound blaster live 5.1

but i dont know what about graphic card, i think cheapest dvi card would be enough+ dvi to hdmi cabel, please help me with that

Hard drive- it could be funny or something, but i would like to go with 2gb hard drive, just enough to install win xp + media portal. My normal PC is on 24/7 and its downloading new shows and so on, so i would simply like to connect it with HTPC thrue lan, and get everything from my hard drives(420gb). Is it going to work? lan is enough to stream this kind of data?

My biggest problem is that, i am not sure, this cpu would handle 720p xvid or divix, since my tv is HD it would be cool to be able to play back this resolutions, so if somebody knows what is minimum for this formats, please tell me.

Oh and my wirdest idea, is that i would be able to play games on my htpc, but using my normal pc, something like, you can control another pc, but can ou play games from this pc? i wouldnt need secound expensive graphic card.

I think that someone who ever downloaded some show from internet understed my and can help me,

thanks and sorry for my english:)
 

phertiker

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June 29, 2005
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1. You can MAYBE play 720p stuff if it's been encoded in Xvid, but I wouldn't count on that PC playing anything done in straight MPEG2 transport streams or H.264, or anything ABOVE 720p...

2. Probably any cheapo graphics card would be fine; it wouldn't be worth buying a US$200 graphics card to put in there. You'd be better off buying a bunch more RAM.

If at all possible, testing is the way to go here. Slap a graphics card in and see how it does with HD stuff, there's tons of clips and trailers available all over the place compressed with every codec imaginable.

3. Don't bother trying to play games on another pc over a network. VNC is about the only way I can think of, and it wouldn't be a pretty sight. It certainly wouldn't be any fun.

Good luck! I was never impressed with HD until my parents bought a TV, now they can't get me to leave their house!
 

maniu

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December 30, 2006
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1. Yeah, xvid should be enough:)
2. do i need more ram if iam only interested in playing back stuffs, not recording?

ok, but what about my cool huge hard drive?
 

kenwonders

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  • January 19, 2007
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    There is absolutely no chance you'll play 720p Xvid on that chip, probably not any HD at all. Your best HD chance is a post 6600 Geforce card and CoreAVC/NVIDIA Pure Video. They'll both use the GPU to decode and hence might make up the processing shortfall
     

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