That's is just simply not true, any card with moderate GPU power, DVI out, and HDCP ready will work, although with AnyDVD the HDCP requirement isn't needed. However it's almost impossible to find a card these days for even $50 that doesn't have at least 256 MB of memory, but a dedicated graphics card isn't even needed. Many HTPC's are built with boards using only integrated graphics solution which don't have anywhere near 256 MB of memory. Video playback is 2 dimensional and as a result are surprisingly undemanding for video HDMI is not needed if DVI is present, there is absolutely no video quality difference between HDMI and DVI, because except for the fact that HDMI also feeds sound through it they are the same connection. A DVI connection will play full 1080P. That's why a lot of video card manufacturers claim HDMI compatibility because they include a small adapter. Completely true since a $50 card will do just fine. The link below is to a popular HTPC card for $37.00 which will do just fine with it's DVI out. Many HTPC's are built from PC's that people no longer use as their main rigs or using motherboards with integrated graphics such as the AMD 780G. Integrated graphics can even be desirable because they don't add any fan noise to the system. Where I do agree is with the minimum system memory of 512 MB, in fact my minimum would be 1 GB just because of the current low prices of memory, and because Windows XP is going to be the minimum operating system requirement. His motherboard is more than good enough to build an HTPC from. HE's using a dual core CPU which is also probably good enough. Here is a link to $72 motherboard with integrated AMD780G graphics probably with less than 32 MB of graphcis memory that with a decent processor will play blu-ray like a champ. If http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131289R Don't want an open boxed unit then here it is again for $89.99 of which both prices fall within your "shot in the foot ranges." Here's another for $76.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186141 Note that these boards include HDMI out, and both will make a decent HD HTPC. A problem in the thinking of many regarding graphics is often made because of gaming requirements which causes some to believe that HD Video requirements must also be just as demanding, and that is nothing more than an internet myth. Two dimensional playback with even HD conetent is remarkably undemanding. I have 5 home built desktop systems and a laptop, and one of them has a socket 939 A8N SLI deluxe motherboard, opteron 170, with an $37 HD 3450 Graphics card and it plays blu-ray in full 1080P flawlessly. ThadiasJ Your motherboard and graphics cards are just fine and probably so is your processor, although if you can find a few bucks now might be the time to pick up a 939 dual core before they're all gone. Your LCD is less than perfect for HD playback but it will play HD content back until you can upgrade, but your picture quality will be no better than your monitors quality and pixel density. I'm using a $119 Lite-On blu ray player which has thus far proven to do an excellent job. I also have an Xbox HD player used on my PC and it too works just fine. The best bet for good playback is for you to optimize what you have. Riggin Your system is largely ready to go. Yes DVI is all that you need. I hope I didn't cross reference either of your specification but I'm trying to answer two questions at once while clearing up a little misinformation.
I also have a very similar Blu_ray requiremnt question. more specifically is my AMD ATHLON 64 X2 4200 CPU adequate? The LG #GGW-HD20L CPU req. is Intel Pentium D 3.2GHz or Equivelent ??? All my other software/hardware is more then adequate & I get a stutter effect when I play Blu-Ray dvd's.
Yes it should more than adequate even without overclocking it which it does quite decently. It's a 2.2 GHz dual core that is roughly equal the Opteron 175 and at stock technically faster than my Opteron 170 (which is seriousl overclocked). The X2 4200 is an all around faster CPU than a 3.2 GHz Pentium D. My Opteron 170 overclocked blew the socks of of my D945 overclocked to 3.75 GHz.
Thanks for the quick reply! Any Idea why i may get a stutter in my video while i play back Blu-Ray DVD on my computer? audio is fine, Can this be linked to a Monitor that is not HDCP? CPU- AMD ATHLON 64 X2 4200 dual core 4 GB of DDR RAM Vid Card - RADEON X1900XT 512 MB GDDR3 GPU OS - VISTA HOME PREM Blu-Ray Drive - GGW-HD20L
That is possible, also I'm not certain that the X1900XT is hdcp ready, or at least mine isn't Go to www.slysoft.com and download a copy of AnDVD which should have a 30 day trial and see if that makes a difference. Other areas to look into would also be to check for a firmware update for your drive.
Great Suggestions, - I had just downloaded the latest Firmware for my Blu-Ray Drive & the Copydvd trial version to my flash drive so that i can give it a shot later tonight. Trying to find the specs on my monitor, to see if that can be the problem. thanks again.
If you have a copy of AnyDVD trial version, the HD version of AnyDVD will remove all HDCP requirements thus making your system effectively HDCP ready.
Here is a reply from an outside forum that you might find interesting. http://www.avforums.com/forums/showpost.php?s=507bb736e7126b34db740389b273672f&p=6960745&postcount=3 Where his system differs from yours is that he has a low end HD capable card (they cost about $40).
Is it normal to take approx 45 min to back up a Blu-Ray DVD (spiderman 3)? can i spped up th e process? Downloaded anydvd, & never made any changes to the default settings, maybe i should have???
It depends on the speed of your individual blu-ray rom, but yes it can take a long time. I've found my times to be usually over 30 minutes. If you've downloaded and installed AnyDVD you might also want to download imgburn. With AnyDVD running in the background you can use imgburn and select "create image file from disc." It will rip a copy of your movie to an iso file which you can then mount with a program such as Daemon tools. Once the image is mounted then PowerDVD can play it back as though it were from a blu-ray player. This is one way to test whether or not any jerkiness in playback is cause by your blu-ray rom player. BTW, let me know how things work because others will want to hear it too because they might have your same issues. http://www.imgburn.com/
Sorry, I Fxxked up & pressed reply too early. Not sure why you have stutter when playing from the Drive. Its a good sugestion to rip to an iso & playback that to see if it makes any difference. I use Nero 8 image tool to mount iso files. Using AnyDVD will not make any difference to your stutter playback and is not HDCP related. If you don't have HDCP compliance you will get a message asking you to use an analogue connection after the first 30 seconds or so of the movie starting up. Not too familiar with ATI catalyst. Can you check if "Hardware Acceleration" is enabled? That being disabled could create stutter problems.
Just think of how many gig's of data we are talking here. I did 46Gig of "In Pursuit of Happiness" which took about 55/60mins.
There is another issue with ATI drivers that I and others have had an issue with. Versions 8.5 and 8.6 have problems with overlay and won't work at all. If you have these drivers then roll back to version 8.4 which works great.
I've never done much above 32 GB so I will have to agree on your time. LOL I also have an Xbox HD player which can really take a long time because it is USB and naturally slower so more than 40 minutes is common there.
Sophocles, you didn't read what i said very well did you. I mentioned certain brands for a reason. I find it though gratifying to note that you mentioned the dual core... but you even you didn't ask about the mobo. You proved my point by selecting a foxconn board though, he'll probably have to through about 3 or 4 of those just to get a good working board, and even more so by selecting an asus... I did mention a low end board, and that's within the 100 range. (Bad experiences with fonconn personally.) Thing part is you can get a dual core amd or intel quad to run on some junky boards that can shoot the whole on board video aspect out the window, which is why I asked. Another note: a 128 card would be playing a blu-ray the same way it would play doom3... There are ALOTof clones out there that don't do what is needed, and this is the same for some 256 types too is all I'm saying. Now, is it needed? As long as he's got at least 1 gig of ram if its on board he ought to be okay, other wise its gonna skip / freeze a second every once in while. Some on boards use the ram as part of its actual processing of video, and it doesn't matter if its a custom, or out of the box computer. If one wants quality it is worth the time to get a card, because video cards just like sound cards take the work load off the processor. This is a simple fact of gaming to which anyone would agree. Now can this concept cause one to believe that it needs a strong video card, when in fact it doesn't to which I tip my hat off to you because this is just as true. It why I said buying a 600+ dollar video card is not worth it unless doing a high-end gaming machine. Bottom line is... I think we all agree his computer ought to be just fine for Blu-ray... Am I right? Only thing I'd say is he might want to want add a little more ram, just to be on the safe side. When selects his video card odds are he may easily be able to play a doom3 if he goes with a 256mb as said, but just like playing the game, might need the ram. Now if doesn't want to, then shut off a few of the graphical stuff that xp uses. After all xp can easily use up to, in some cases, 200mb of ram. By switching it to classic, aka windows 98 look alike, he cuts the ram use down by; what nearly one third to sometimes one half right? (Sophocles... thanks for reminding me about the fact of high demand, because as a gamer its does lead one into that high demand mode... I don't know if I'd call it a myth though; I would in serious call it a trap! Because the more you want speed, performance, and quality the more you want high-end.)
I read what you had written more than once while I was forming a reply to insure that what I had to say was true and respectful. Some of your statements were not entirely correct although it is possible that they were unintentionally so. Although I generally don't use Foxconn boards in my builds but they have some decent boards on the market, and build better boards than those that usually come in your commercial retail computers. I also listed an Asus board which you seemed to have ignored. It's not the board that determines if a quad core can run in it, it's the chipset and the chipsets in lower priced boards are similar to or often the same as boards costing twice their price. Again however who was mentioning junky boards. A board at $79 can be as good in quality as a $200 board they just usually have shaved down options such as limited bios control, a single Ethernet port, Don't offer crossfire or SLI, fewer PCI/e slots, 3 phase power supplies, no RAID controllers, lower priced chipset such as P35, but still very good. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131229 Here's another board by Asus that won't be much of an overclocker because of its Nvidia chipset, but it will play blu-Ray and has HDMI out. It is probably better than 90% of all the motherboards in store bought rigs. The reason a lot of cards don't play blu-Ray well is that a lot of earlier cards and some recent cards that claimed HDCP ready really weren't. Also many earlier cards had very poor HD acceleration which has little to do with how much memory they have. Ndidia has cards with 128 MB that they recommend for blu-ray playback, however the price of a playable dedicated card is so low these days debating memory is a waste of time. If it weren't for some integrated graphics that can do the job with very little memory I would have left the statement alone. Integrated graphics simly make use of system resources when needed. This statement could be unnecessarily upsetting to someone who might actually have all the right stuff, but find it not working properly and start spending money for no reason. I wouldn't want to be the cause of someone spending money they don't need to spend. Not one motherboard or system mentioned in this thread could is of low quality, and all of them are able run at least dual core processors or better. The slowest processor of the those listed is the AMD 3500 plus which is a pretty fast, faster than a P4 processor which probably can support play blu-ray playback although I did suggest an upgrade to dual core since 939 dual core processors can be found for less than $50. Can't hurt to hedge ones bets. The other fellow already has a blu-ray player in a system that is well suited for it and he is experiencing some jerkiness which I suspect is more likely caused by his blu ray player, but even that won't stop his ability to play it back if that's the case because all that he has to do is rip it to his hard drive as an ISO and play it. If it turns out that it is indeed his drive then the next step is to see if it can be resolved before resorting to a rip and play strategy which by the way many people currently use. This is mostly true, but you did know that 32 bit WinXP can usually assign no more than .8 Gigabytes to an individual task? Now if one has two gigabytes of system memory exactly what else are they going to be doing with it while watching a blu-ray movie. Most wouldn't be doing anything else that requires large chunks of memory although I often encode while watching an HD or Blu-Ray movie, but encoding is more processor intensive than memory intensive. I'm currently a beta tester for DiVx' new H.264 decoder which is the same format that PowerDVD uses to decode their HD movies with. I've compared H.264 decoders from DiVx, Mainconcept (who DiVx now owns), FFDsho, Coreavc, and x.264 and although their uses of resources vary, none of them used more than 20% of processor resources. When I tested playback of Blu-Ray using powerDVD Ultra 8 it never used more than 8% resources.
I'll agree completely that I wasn't being totally correct. Here's what my thinking normally is, and its likely due being in computer retail... always leave yourself a little bit of wiggle room in case you want to do something else behind the scenes. Its also why I mentioned the whole 600+dollar video card thing. As far as raid controllers, cross-fire, sli , or having a second ethernet / gigabit port goes... that mostly needed for high-end gaming... or if you need to be backing up your data constantly. Your asus board is on the low end and is a great selection! So is what he has in his system. I also did know this about xp, that's why I mentioned shutting off some of the graphical stuff, more wiggle room. Without a doubt he'd be okay. No disrespect taken, and hope none was given. (Both thumbs up!) Hey... here's a thought to the person who did this forum... do you have a an LCD TV or plasma? Odds are it could have a dvi port thus really solving the monitor situation. Its an idea.
I do not have and LCD or Plasma TV, but I desperately want one! I've been researching and shopping around, but the wife is totally against it. I do have my 19" widescreen LCD monitor, which is why I'm considering blue-ray on my PC as a cheaper substitute.
RAID controllers are actually very good for data transfer and redundant storage depending on your purpose and in some cases both. RAID 0 (which really isn't a true RAID) is good for speeding data transfer which is excellent for servers and other forms of RAID are for making identical backup copies to another disk for quick data recovery in the event of a failure. Crossfire is indeed good for only gaming and is not important for my most peoples purposes such as Blu-Ray playback, and in fact for most gamers a single $300 card such as the HD 4870 is more than adequate for all but two or three games avaiable. If one removes a lot of those features listed above they can build a pretty decent computer for fewer dollars. I have computer that I recently built using a board similar to the one in the link I'll provide except that it had the older P965 chipset. I added an E6600 processor and then overclocked it to 3.35 GHz and believe it or not it will easily take any commercial PC probably up to at least $2000. If it had the newer P35 chipset in the link I'm providing it would have even been better. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128337 You can easily find them but here is an example. Remember there are no qualitative differences between DVI and HDMI they are essentially the same. http://www.ramelectronics.net/audio-video/adapters/hdmi-dvi-adapters/c10000-c14000-c14001-p1.html A solid suggestion and even if the TV had only HDMI an AVI to HDMI adapter will remedy that. jeice28 We are good, I've taken no offense to anything discussed here. I spent more years than I care to discuss as a high end AV consultant so I understand where you're coming from. Fortunately I moved on to something that gave me a few hours of my life back every week and two months in the summer.
