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Video card quality affecting Blue ray video playback?

cbn

cbn

Lifer
I am thinking of getting one of those Blue Ray players/DVD read/write optical drives mentioned in the anandtech Midrange system buyers guide.

Just wondering if video card quality has any effect "Bad or good" or video play back quality from a Blue ray player?

Also is there such a device/additional card that would let me use my Computer LCD for watching Direct TV or Cable TV?

Thanks
 
The version of video does matter, actually.

For Bluray playback ATI cards I believe are all pretty consistent and have supported hardware decoding / offloading since the HD 2000 series.

The nVidia cards are quite a bit more hit and miss when it comes to proper "PureVideo" support.

It seems there are 3 different versions of PureVideo and only the 9600GT series and the newest GTX 260/275/280/285 support PureVideo 3.

I have a 8800/9800GT and they only support PureVideo 2. I think only the G92 supports PureVideo 2.

Any other older or slower cards back to the Geforce 6 series only support Purevideo 1.

Anyways this is one area where ATI has had much more consistency with their products.

And yes, if you want to watch DirectTV or Cable HDTV on your PC then you will need a TV Tuner card which supports not only ATSC (Over The Air) but CableCard standard as well.

I have a VBoxx Cats Eye and it only supports ATSC. I think some of the latest Huappage and ATI TV Wonder HDTV tuner cards have all of the features your looking for.
 
I've had no problem decoding Blu-Ray with my 8800GT.

What you need to watch DirecTV/cable is a decoder box... Plugged directly into your monitor. Assuming your monitor can handle a 16:9 HDTV signal, anyway. Messing around with routing the signal through the computer is a giant pain (cablecard adapters, for example, are only available through prebuilt computers) and best avoided altogether.
 
Originally posted by: Just learning
I am thinking of getting one of those Blue Ray players/DVD read/write optical drives mentioned in the anandtech Midrange system buyers guide.

Just wondering if video card quality has any effect "Bad or good" or video play back quality from a Blue ray player?
Click to expand...

It's not so much "Bad or good" regarding video quality, rather it's the amount of hardware acceleration the card has to take the load off your CPU. Different generations of video cards from AMD and Nvidia have different levels of acceleration. So you could theoretically get by with a lower end CPU if you have a video card with higher levels of video acceleration. Personally, I have a 2.8 GHz P4 HTPC with an LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD/DVD drive and it plays all our movies just fine because I also have an ATI 3870 video card that does a lot of the decoding on the GPU rather than the computer's CPU.

Originally posted by: Just learning
Also is there such a device/additional card that would let me use my Computer LCD for watching Direct TV or Cable TV?

Thanks
Click to expand...

By "Computer LCD", I'm going to assume you mean a regular standalone LCD monitor connected to a desktop computer and are not referring to a laptop LCD.

For watching cable TV, you could pick up a regular television tuning card. It wouldn't let you watch pay channels or channels above 121 (I think), but you could at least get the regular unscrambled ones. To watch Direct TV, I think you would need to connect a video output from the Direct TV box to an input port on the TV tuning card. You would only be able to watch whatever channel the Direct TV box was set at, but at least you would be able to display it on your computer monitor.

I'm not even close to being an expert on this topic, so I apologize if it turns out I'm giving you incorrect information. Hopefully somebody with more experience on the subject will chime in to clarify things.
 
I have GPU acceleration turned off in PowerDVD cause I don't like what my 3850 does to the output image. It's rather funny that you have to get PowerDVD to turn the acceleration off and then it's off only when using PowerDVD naturally. Why the hell can't you do this in CCC? At least not with the 8.2 cats.
 
anyone know of any good articles or links that explain how to use the features/filters of your software player. I am using MPC HC and it has all these filter/shader options, might as well use them, even if they do provide only a slight improvement
 
Originally posted by: s44
I've had no problem decoding Blu-Ray with my 8800GT.

What you need to watch DirecTV/cable is a decoder box... Plugged directly into your monitor. Assuming your monitor can handle a 16:9 HDTV signal, anyway. Messing around with routing the signal through the computer is a giant pain (cablecard adapters, for example, are only available through prebuilt computers) and best avoided altogether.
Click to expand...

Will a 16:10 monitor handle a 16:9 signal?

It seems a lot of the new Computer LCDs are coming out with 16:9 native resolution but I still prefer having 10% extra vertical viewing area.
 
Thanks for all the help so far. Just wondering.....

Is 1080p the same thing as 1920x1080? Or is 1080p something different?

Can a 32" LCD 1080p TV be used as a computer monitor if it has a DVI input?
 
Absolutely. You will have more black border space, however. The monitor can also be switched to 1920x1080 for video playback. I do this sometimes and it works fine for that purpose.

And yes, people do that all the time. Problem with a 32" is, if it isn't a 1080p then your pixel count is no higher than a laptop, and in either case using one for productivity work can be difficult because of ergonomic issues.
 
Can I use these HDTV tuner cards with Windows XP Home edition? Or do I need the special Media Center editions of Windows?
 
Should I be browsing for a video card with native HDMI port?

Or is this a moot point if the LCD monitor speaker are not being used?

I am asking because HDMI is supposed to have higher bandwidth than DVI (a DVI to HDMI adapter can be used but wont carry the audio)
 
The DVI out on the video card will carry the audio signal. The monitor would also have to support it or you would have to find a DVI>HDMI adapter that carries the signal.
 
Originally posted by: Davegod
The DVI out on the video card will carry the audio signal. The monitor would also have to support it or you would have to find a DVI>HDMI adapter that carries the signal.
Click to expand...

Some cards yes, some cards no.
 
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