Hardware DVD decoder cards

[graeme_2]

Has anyone had any experience of hardware dvd decoder cards? Im in the process of building a cheap htpc, its gonna be using old components. The processor is either a 1.2ghz celeron or a 1.3ghz athlon (depending if i go micro-atx or full atx)

So basically its gonna need all the help it can get. Im not bothered about really high quality or any of this hi def stuff (like it would play it anyway!) but would one of these cards be a good idea? Im thinking of trying it out as it will give me tvout as well which means i can use onboard graphics.

Been experimenting with ffdshow on my main pc, and the results are impressing me. But I doubt one of the above processors would be able to do much with it, would there be a big difference in quality between this and a hardware card?

One more thing, would it help out with playing digital tv as well. Or just dvds.

Thanks.

 

[Werewolf]

I've got a couple of old hollywood+ decoder cards that were/are excellent, however I don't think you're going to need anything like them with even a 1.2 celeron, as long as the video card is reasonably good.


With regard to digital TV for that you will need a digital TV card.

 

[mancubas]

Look at Nvidia Pure Video which is a hardware decoder and gives "similiar" results to FFDShow.

http://nvidia.com/page/purevideo.html

You'll need the following cards which support NVidia PureVideo.

GeForce 7800 GPUs
GeForce 7300 GPUs
GeForce 6800 GPUs
GeForce 6600 GPUs
GeForce 6200 GPUs

ManC