What's keeping it back? (HTPC Question)

Aleksandrs

Aleksandrs

Aleksandrs

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So apart from my computer, we also have a HTPC in the living room which was built at Christmas last year.
So far with 1920x1080 video it has managed to play perfectly fine (I say perfectly, I mean it was watchable but sometimes had slight drop in framerate). However we have just put Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince onto it and ripped it onto pc which plays from M2TS format. However in the brighter and more intensive parts of the film, the framerate does drop and the sound goes out of sync quite considerably.

I put the film on my other PC and my laptop and the playback is faultless so I am pretty much guessing that the hardware in the Media Center PC is holding it back.

However because money is tight I want to know what exactly is holding the computer back from it playing 1080 films so just the one bit can be replaced and not the rest of it.

The spec is:

Motherboard: WinFast 6100M2MA
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.2Ghz
Memory: 2x 1GB Corsair XMS2 800Mhz
Graphics card: nVidia Geforce 8400GS
OS: 7 Ultimate 64bit

I would naturally guess at it being the graphics card but apparently I read somewhere that video is rendered with the CPU? I'm not that clued up really because I just bought a PC and it worked and this one doesn't work so well so thought I would ask y'all on here to see what you say.

Anyway just let me know what you think is holding it back, and whatever it is, if you have any ideas on what to replace it with? (This is strictly just a PC for watching video and listening to music and really needs to be as cheap as possible).

Thanks in advance!
 
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could it be the software you are ripping with thats an issue rather than hardware?
i havent done ripping from dvds for nearly 10 years so out of the loop, but back then the ripping/playback quality was largely down to the codecs and software used to rip it. just an idea as i cant see anything there thats too bad and would cause major issues or video playback.
 
Well I took the same files made from the initial Blu ray rip to the other computers and they were fine, so I can't see it being a codec issue. Media Center Classic and VLC both played the movie perfectly on my PC and my Laptop.
 
paradisiac said:
hmm...........i know this is a long shot, but old slow hdd?
whats it like playing direct off the dvd?
Click to expand...

Might not have worded it well, but the Blu-Ray player isn't on any of our PCs. We bought it to play on the Blu Ray player at home, but wanted to back the film up on the PC so used a friends PC who happens to have a blu ray drive to rip then copied it over. Its our temporary solution I guess.

As for HDD; I think its a 7200rpm, but now you've said it, it MAY be 5600rpm. Bit late to go and check now. All else I remember is its 300GB Sata.

Edit: HDD is about 6 years old i think. This HTPC was built from spare parts I had laying around, and its happened to work pretty well so no point in getting a massive overhaul on parts if its not necessary.
 
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if the hard drive is sata it should be quick enough, it may be that the 8400gs is not helping with the decode and the cpu just aint powerful enough.
i used both a 8400 gs and a 9400 gt with an athlon 64 3500+ and neither of them could play all the hd dvd's i tried to play with them (they did manage to play some fine though) but when i changed to a radeon 4350 it was able to play them all.
perhaps you could try a radeon 4350 or whatever the new 5 series low end cards will be or something newer from nvidia like the gt220 as i think they have a newer core that has added media decoding stuff.
 
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if you can hold on a couple of weeks i think the new radeon 5 series low end cards are coming out the second week of february so i would suggest waiting to see the pricing and specs on them.
but that 4650 should be more than capable of playing them.
 
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Don't straight away think that it's the hardware. It may sound stupid but I had seriously problems with video codecs under 64bit OS's. I can't remember whether it was 64 os + 64bit codecs or 64bit os + 32bit codecs but it caused a fair bit of trouble with lagging and audio sync. Might be worth trying some different ones before changing hardware.

Went back to a 32bit OS and it worked fine with all the same films I was having problems with before.
 
Pulse said:
Don't straight away think that it's the hardware. It may sound stupid but I had seriously problems with video codecs under 64bit OS's. I can't remember whether it was 64 os + 64bit codecs or 64bit os + 32bit codecs but it caused a fair bit of trouble with lagging and audio sync. Might be worth trying some different ones before changing hardware.

Went back to a 32bit OS and it worked fine with all the same films I was having problems with before.
Click to expand...

Fair comment, but all the other computers I tested on also run Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, and all have the same codecs and programs running, which is what made me blame the hardware.
 
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