Still confused on HTPC build - more help plz!

You mentioned earlier in your thread that play back of 1080HD content was a bit jerky. I'm wondering what your going to do about this situation? Are you going to invest in a HD graphics card or maybe overclock the CPU to see if that compensates for it?

Just interested to know as I'm planning a very similar build after xmas but ideally would like it to play HD and Blue Ray films and would like to know if I'm going to need to invest in something like a ATi 2600HD for smooth playback.
 
it is just one file which is jerky when played through media centre. it is ok in wmp11. I am going to get a 2600xt just after christmas so that I get lower cpu usage which means I will be confident recording tv while watching hd. At the moment when playing 1080p my keysonic keyboard seems slow to wakr up at times.

The problem with the 2600 cards is finding a silent one with the hdmi dongle included - a lot don't have it and you need the 24 pin ati one for sound over hdmi. A standard dvi>hdmi adapter wont do it.

1080p h264 cpu usage when output to at 720p screen is 50-60% atm.

I don't really plan on overclocking the chip as the board isn't reportedly a great clocker and I want to keep the fans low as it is practically silent at the moment.
 
Good point about the dongle, would you mind keeping this thread updated when you find the right card? Do you think if you used a Phenom CPU the playback would be smoother?
 
I'm no expert on this but probably, yes. It may depend on how multithreaded the codec used for playback is.

As I said before, what I have built so far is really quiet for air cooling and I am looking for a passive 2600 so this doesn't increase. I'm not sure what the cooler in the phenom is like concerning heat and noise.

In terms of the dongle, the gigabyte's definately don't have it. I think the sapphire 2600xt does. It seems more commonly included in US bundles compared to the EU ones. Best to ask the retailer or pop in if you can
 
Furton said:
What CPU cooler are you using? Is there much space in the Fusion for a big cooler?
Click to expand...

i'm using the standard cooler that came with the chip.

I can't measure the case at the moment as it is now wrapped from christmas! I wouldn't imagine you could get a very tall cooler in there though. At a guess take 10mm off the case height.
 
just an update

I got a 2600xt
orginally I went for the passive gigabyte one but it didn't fit the antec fusion case so I ended up with the powercolor one with has a zalmanesque heatsink. neither of these cars had the dvi-hdmi dongle but I output sound over spdif so it's not an issue

however, for me this has so far been a bit of a pointless update as I don't have a HD optical drive. I can now playback h264 endoded blu ray and hd-dvd images using powerdvd and get hardware acceleration. I also get hardware acceleration for mpeg2 but there is not hardware acceleration for vc-1 titles. This is isn't a biggy as they are less demanding that h264 contnet but I am seeing very high cpu usage with a vc-1 encode of pans labyrinth.

the problem is that the cyberlink h264 codec which is needed for x264 hardware acceleration is incompatible with many .mkv's. There is no way in VMC af far as I can see to tell it to use coreavc or similar for .mkv's and then use powerdvd for hd-dvd/blu-ray so to get .mkv's playing through VMC again you need to uninstall powerdvd. You can tell something like km player to use a specific codec but this takes away the simplicity of using vmc
 
Have you tried increasing the priority of the CoreAVC codec? Try using Directshow filter manager to increase it, as PowerDVD will always use its own codecs regarless of priority.

Also, you should get VC-1 acceleration with PowerDVD. It's Nvidia cards that don't accelerate VC-1, so something is up there. I'd look into that some more.
 
the tip one the direct show filer manager also worked (after a restart) on my xp/8800gt machine.

will try that and 7.7 cats on the htpc tomorrow
 
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