HTPC Help?

[henryma]

I just put together a crappy HTPC, with leftover parts: some old ECS mobo, a 2.8GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB DDR RAM, a FX 5900XT, and an old IDE hard drive I've had lying around. Though for certain high-quality rips it looks great, at certain parts of movies it gets choppy and freezes up, what could this possibly be caused by? I was also wondering if my 5900XT was too old to play on my 40" HDTV, I've plugged in an HDMI to DVI adapter to it, and I feel that it looks a little blurrier than the VGA I had before, is that normal for an old card; what do I do?!

 

[Swamp]

Have you checked to see how much of ur cpu is being used?

 

[henryma]

When watching movies 60%-70% of the processor is being used, does that cause the choppiness? Or is it really just the old video card =\

 

[Rhoxed]

the ram doesnt help

FWIW i have a similar HTPC for my bedroom, your biggest problem will be matching the right codecs for good quality/performance - i would try a mix of AC3, CoreAVC, and FFDSHOW

my hardware is as follows for smooth 1080P playback on a 56" Toshiba DLP
P4 3.0Ghz with HT @ 3.8Ghz
Asus P4P800 SE
1GB DDR-400
AGP FX5900XT

 

[Rhoxed]

the ram doesnt help

FWIW i have a similar HTPC for my bedroom, your biggest problem will be matching the right codecs for good quality/performance - i would try a mix of AC3, CoreAVC, and FFDSHOW

my hardware is as follows for smooth 1080P playback on a 56" Toshiba DLP
P4 3.0Ghz with HT @ 3.8Ghz
Asus P4P800 SE
1GB DDR-400
AGP FX5900XT

 

[fffblackmage]

or just install CCCP and use the included MPC-HC to play everything without worrying about whether you have the right codec or whatnot.

Also, you did not mention what movies you were playing. DVDs? Blu-ray? xvid or h264 video files? etc etc...

 

[henryma]

I'm playing .h264 files currently, but once I get a new mobo I might get a blu-ray drive. My crappy ECS motherboard has no SATA Would BIOSTAR P4M900M4 mATX Motherboard (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813138079) be worth it? I'm wary of Biostar but I'm totally in need of some more RAM perhaps and maybe a low-end PCI-E video card; that should do it no? Oh and thanks for the suggestions so far, putting CCCP on now, since I have CoreAVC and FFDSHOW installed already

 

[flexy]

i had a thread like that two days ago, i also did a little research. On my old HTPC i still had an old radeon X850.

Now i got a new Asus Silent Radeon 4350 (which is HIGHLY raved about as a really good HTPC card) for €30 shipped. It has full hardware decoding of h.264 which i needed. Because my old card struggled sometimes with full HD h.264 in high resolutions.

So..that radeon 4350 is ultra cheap and seems to be #1 choice for any HTPC. By the way i have a 52" plasma connected to the HTPC using Media Player Home Cinema which can use DXVA hardware acceleration.

Edit: I USED to use CoreAVC also (Cuda)...but i think DXVA is the better way to go (even more efficient than Cuda)...otherwise i would have gotten a GTX 210. But people convinced me that i dont need Cuda/CoreAVC and DXVA is better.

Then i also read a few reviews and people were raving about the Radeon 4350 for HTPC...and the fact that its passive/silent is cool too!

And of course i use AC3 filter.

 

[fffblackmage]

Recently, I played around with DXVA on my desktop rig, since I ran across this guide. DXVA didn't work on my rig for the sample videos provided on that guide. However, it did work for the h264 videos I have, which is awesome because CPU utilization drops to just about zero (not that I had trouble playing h264 videos anyways).

Should you get a PCI-e gfx card, make sure it's capable of DXVA. I believe some of the older nVidia 8-series are capable, but aren't as good as the newer cards.
nvidia purevideo
ATI avivo

I personally don't find a $50 mobo for a very old socket cheap, and for good reason. This past Black Friday, I got the Athlon II X2 240 + MSI mobo for $50 at Fry's.

 

[flexy]

I put the Radeon 4350 in today. Yes, i know that guide also.

I tried to play the "demos" from their site, and they lagged badly on the 4350 and DXVA was not active for those videos (as they guide says), but then i think this is some extreme examples since DXVA works great with ALL my .h264 movies. Only those "demos" are weird - so i really don't care.

Recently, i also experienced that "artifact" issue with CoreAVC...and now everything runs great with MPC HC and the internal MPC codec using DXVA.

Its amazing how i paid like $400+ bucks for the X850 when it came out, and now i am better off with a card for €24.95.