Minimum hardware for Vista MCE w/ Bluray abilities

[Leros]

I'm looking at building lower budget htpc. $300-400 would be ideal my max. What is the minimum requirement for getting Bluray playback? I'd like to avoid a separate video card, to keep the cost down. Would any of the integrated video chipsets be powerful enough?

 

[yh125d]

780G, G45, Nvidia 9300/9400 IGP are all powerful enough. Match that with 2gb of ram and something like an e2200 from intel, or A64 X2 4850e from AMD and a TV tuner if you like and G2G

 

[Denithor]

e5200 is the lowest Intel chip I'd get these days. e2200 will cost a few dollars less but it has half the cache, a slower clockspeed and runs hotter (65nm vs 45nm).

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Leros
Minimum hardware for Vista MCE w/ Bluray abilities

This guy is building one

 

[Leros]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Leros
Minimum hardware for Vista MCE w/ Bluray abilities

This guy is building one

Thats me

 

[syee]

I'm using a GA-MA78GM-S2H board, and it plays back Blu Ray discs with no problem. I have a setup fairly similar to yours:

Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H rev 1.1 board
AMD Phenom 9600 CPU
2GB PC6400 DDR2 RAM
320GB Seagate 7200rpm SATA HD

Played Planet Earth on Blu Ray and it worked flawlessly. The Gigabyte box even claims full 1080p playback capability, and I'm pretty sure it has hardware acceleration for this as well in the 780g/ATI3200 chipset.

 

[Zim Hosein]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Leros
Minimum hardware for Vista MCE w/ Bluray abilities

This guy is building one

:laugh:

 

[mechBgon]

Some of the coverage in this article at Xbit Labs may be relevant to you. They cover playback quality, performance and audio aspects for add-in cards, and also several integrated video chipsets.