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So Christmas came and went and my family decided to gift me with some money to do a htpc. Here is where I am torn...I have been following this thread for a while and have several options: Acer Aspire Revo Atom 230 AsRock Ion 330 Dell ZinoHD Dual Core, Win7, 3 gig Mem, 320gb HD, Radeon 4330 512mb With the Dell and the AsRock I get a dvd drive out of the deal and possibly upgrade to a Blu-Ray for the Dell. My main goals are to have Win 7 on any choice (I have Win 7 if needed in the case of the Revo), load XBMC as a front end and playback DVD Isos, xvids and high def mkv/whatever container. Mainly use it as a media player. I am not worried about video capture. Short of DVD/Blu-Ray drives is there any reason to pick a Dell ZinoHD/AsRock 330 over the Revo? From everything I have read people seem to have install packages ready to go for the Revo's. Just looking for some persuasion one way or the other before I make the final purchase.
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Dec 26, 2009 19:34
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Syano posted:So does this mean I will FINALLY be able to build a tv server and pass content through ethernet to the TVs in the house? With Windows Media Center Extender boxes or a bunch of XBoxen, yes.
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Dec 26, 2009 19:35
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strikrr posted:So Christmas came and went and my family decided to gift me with some money to do a htpc. Here is where I am torn...I have been following this thread for a while and have several options: In general, no, not for your described uses. That being said, the Zino does have an overall faster processor, and the ability to drop in an internal DVD/Bluray drive, so it's a good deal as well. Even the base configuration can handle HD playback, but dell is forcing the 4330 option with the bluray drive. Also, there's really no need for 3gb of ram in the zino.
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Dec 26, 2009 20:47
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I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but I am moving into a house and moving my PC from the living room to the office, so my PC will not be able to double as an HTPC anymore. I have an Xbox 360 (unmodded) and wanted to know what a 360 can do as an HTPC. From what I have found online it looks like the Xbox 360 can stream media from my PC in the other room. How is the performance with this? Can it do 1080P? How is it as a music player? Are there programs which work better which require modding? I have had a hard time finding out what the 360 is capable of as an HTPC. My gut is telling me that most likely my 360 will not be adequate and I will need a new HTPC, but I want to make sure I don't go out and spend a lot when I could have just used my Xbox 360.
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Dec 26, 2009 20:50
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Crackbone posted:In general, no, not for your described uses. That being said, the Zino does have an overall faster processor, and the ability to drop in an internal DVD/Bluray drive, so it's a good deal as well. Even the base configuration can handle HD playback, but dell is forcing the 4330 option with the bluray drive. Also, there's really no need for 3gb of ram in the zino. With this...have you seen any well written guides on setting up Windows 7/XBMC onto the Revo? Everything so far on Google refers to the R3610 (Atom 330) for Win7, not the AR1600 (Atom 230LE). So now I am wondering will I be able to install win7 on the Revo 1600(Atom 230). If I can do all of that on a 230 I will probably buy 2 of them...one for the bedroom one for the living room.
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Dec 26, 2009 22:02
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About to pull the trigger on building an HTPC for my living room. Will be connecting to a Samsung 56" DLP television. Budget is to be about $400. Here is what I was thinking: ZOTAC IONITX-A-U - $185 CORSAIR XMS2 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) - $86 (4 gigs is probably overkill, but RAM is cheap enough) Rosewill RC-CIX-01 BK Glossy Black Steel Cube Mini-ITX Computer Case - $60 (Theres a combo deal for this case + a MC remote for this price) Western Digital Caviar Green WD5000AADS 500GB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive - $55 (Wasn't looking for a lot of HD space directly on the HTPC, as my media is on a networked box. What was important was "green" for being quieter) Sony Optiarc Black 24X DVD+R... - $32 Still a little torn on swapping the DVD for Bluray. Currently my movie collection is about 800 physical DVDs. Planning on running XBMC on Windows 7 and pulling media from a networked share, and maybe some Hulu/Netflix/Youtube content. Have I missed anything here?
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Dec 26, 2009 23:57
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WTFPWND posted:About to pull the trigger on building an HTPC for my living room. Will be connecting to a Samsung 56" DLP television. Budget is to be about $400. Here is what I was thinking:
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Dec 27, 2009 05:44
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WTFPWND posted:About to pull the trigger on building an HTPC for my living room. Will be connecting to a Samsung 56" DLP television. Budget is to be about $400. Here is what I was thinking: Get the Zotac board with the PCI slot. It will really help you out if you decide to put a tv tuner in it..Or additional storage or w/e.
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Dec 27, 2009 08:33
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blankooie posted:Get the Zotac board with the PCI slot. It will really help you out if you decide to put a tv tuner in it..Or additional storage or w/e. Guessing you mean this one? Assuming the power supply in that Rosewill case (150W) will be more than sufficient for this board + 1 HDD?
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Dec 27, 2009 15:11
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Saukkis posted:You need a IR receiver and a program that reads the receiver device and send the commands to the programs. I use an ancient Evation Irman with old version of Girder/Promixis. Windows Media Center (MCE) receivers are probably the easiest ones to find nowadays, but check that they work with the software you'll use. Some other software besides Promixis are HIP and WinLIRC. Dominoes fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Dec 27, 2009 |
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Dec 27, 2009 17:27
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Dominoes posted:Thanks. Can you point me in the direction of the hardware? Newegg has a few like this, but don't seem to be what I'm looking for. It shouldn't have to be application-specific: My keyboard isn't. There are standard controls that keyboards use that will work in most Windows and Linux programs I've tried with no external software. There's no reason why a device that I'm looking for shouldn't exist. I'm looking for something that will take IR input from a universal remote, then output the appropriate universal commands for pause, play, stop, volume, forward and backward via USB, like a keyboard. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16880121001&cm_re=mce_remote-_-80-121-001-_-Product
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Dec 27, 2009 18:48
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WTFPWND posted:Guessing you mean this one? It should be, as long as the rosewill PS isn't a supreme piece of junk. These boards really do not use much energy at all.
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Dec 27, 2009 19:32
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I've got a fairly new PC, with audio and video being run through a Radeon HD4890 to my Onkyo receiver, which then outputs the video to my 1080p monitor. I'd like to start getting BluRay movies, but if I were to buy a standalone BluRay player, I'd prefer to buy a PS3, and I don't have $300 right now. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106325 Would I have any problems just popping this into my PC? Other than DVD software that will play BluRay movies, is there anything else I should be aware of?
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Dec 27, 2009 20:57
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Assuming you're running Windows, you should be fine popping in the drive and watching movies. Just make sure the monitor you're running is HDCP compliant, which if you're using HDMI it should be. edit: Yep, ordering one of those drives. Got a lot of dogs in the fire, Stanimal. TheScott2K fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Dec 28, 2009 |
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Dec 27, 2009 23:57
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TheScott2K posted:With Windows Media Center Extender boxes or a bunch of XBoxen, yes. You know, you have to wonder why an actual computer with windows media center cant be used as an extender to windows media center.
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Dec 28, 2009 15:19
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Syano posted:You know, you have to wonder why an actual computer with windows media center cant be used as an extender to windows media center. With Media Center you have to realize Microsoft only gets things right by accident. When you hope for it to do something what you really have to do is hope that some other move by MS has some blowback effect that results in what you want (Zune store revamp adding video podcast content to WMC, for example). If they had half a brain they'd be gutting Apple's video download business by being in year four of marketing ATSC/ClearQAM tuners to people, with WMC sporting the ability to reencode for portable devices or easily toss the recording to any PC in the house. Other PCs would be usable as extenders, there would be a Youtube button on the front page of the interface, opening CableCard would have had some actual loving consequences, the fantastic official Netflix plugin would work on extenders, ZuneHD could play recordings with AC3 audio (*facepalm*)... It shows you how valuable a good-looking interface that doesn't crash like it's a feature is when the software still persists, despite Microsoft seeming to despise it.
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Dec 28, 2009 16:42
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Just reporting in to say I bought the ASRock Ion 330 Pro last week, and it's been working wonderfully so far, streaming 1080p off a Windows Home Server machine, via gigabit ethernet. I setup XBMC to play using MPC-HD which was surprisingly simple, and don't have any stutter or lag issues. The computer in general is also very snappy, running Windows 7 64bit. Overclocking to 2.0Ghz took about 5 seconds in the bios. I haven't really tried Hulu yet because Boxee is a piece of poo poo that never works for me, so I'm looking at installing the Hulu desktop application instead. I did have one small issue, when I filled up the hard drive to about 95% I started hearing very distinct seeking noises. I emptied about some space and haven't heard it since.
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Dec 28, 2009 17:16
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So I think I have given up on the Revo and am either going to go with a Zino or self built. On the self built I am looking at either of these setup's. I already have a wd 500 green hd so I will be using that for either build. Anything I am missing/advantages/disadvantages of one vs the other? Would I get that much of a boost from having the E5200 over the other 2 setups? The other thing I am not sure about is if I will have issue with the micro-atx board in the mini-itx case. I know the hole patterns should be the same, but I am not sure about size, especially with cooling in consideration with the second build. Build 1 ZOTAC IONITX-F-E - $179.99 G.Skill 2GB DDR2 800 - $48.99 LITE-ON Black 4X BD-ROM - $59.99 APEX MI-008 Black Steel Mini-ITX - $39.99 Rosewill Windows 7 Certified Remote - $24.99 Total $353.95 Build 2 ASUS P5N7A-VM - $119.99 Intel Pentium E5200 - $64.50 Sony Optiarc Black 24X DVD Burner - $29.99 Everything else from build 1 - Memory, Case and Remote Total $330.45 Build 3 Dell Zino HD Total $349.00
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Dec 28, 2009 20:28
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strikrr posted:The other thing I am not sure about is if I will have issue with the micro-atx board in the mini-itx case. Yeah, I'm pretty sure the board from the second section won't fit in the case from the first. As for which one, I saw you were talking about using XBMC under Windows. I'm happy with my Ion setup under Linux, but would probably opt for a beefier processor under Windows. I'm pretty sure the second configuration would be better than the Zino for software decoding, and it should also run XBMC under Linux well if you wanted to give that a try.
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Dec 28, 2009 22:53
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Lenovo just snuck a nice multimedia Keyboard/Mouse out there Pretty nice, and at $60 (~$30 with coupon codes) it's $50 less than Logitech's diNovoMini
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Dec 28, 2009 23:23
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BorderPatrol posted:Lenovo just snuck a nice multimedia Keyboard/Mouse out there Looks nice. Here's a bit of a review of it.
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Dec 28, 2009 23:54
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BorderPatrol posted:Lenovo just snuck a nice multimedia Keyboard/Mouse out there That looks just about perfect to me.
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Dec 29, 2009 01:37
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BorderPatrol posted:Lenovo just snuck a nice multimedia Keyboard/Mouse out there Looks like the part number is 57Y6336, though all the coupons I'm seeing are expired. Do you have any current ones?
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Dec 29, 2009 01:45
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BorderPatrol posted:Lenovo just snuck a nice multimedia Keyboard/Mouse out there This gets my dick hard.
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Dec 29, 2009 02:23
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BorderPatrol posted:Lenovo just snuck a nice multimedia Keyboard/Mouse out there I ordered one of these the other day. drat thing won't ship until 1/6 though. If there's any interest, I'll follow up after I get to play with it a bit.
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Dec 29, 2009 02:52
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Kreeblah posted:Looks like the part number is 57Y6336, though all the coupons I'm seeing are expired. Do you have any current ones? Nope, looks like Engadget posted this the day after the coupon expired. Ah well.
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Dec 29, 2009 03:12
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Ugh I give up using XBMC-Live and the Revo. the stability of the program just isn't anywhere near the original XBOX. I love (somewhat) being able to watch h264 and other HD files with it, and I really love that it's silent compared to my old XBOX, but it seems to lag a lot, crash, audio-hiccup, and just generally suck. I'll probably hook up an old monitor to the let guests browse or something (I've used 9.04-9.11, all have some sort of issue).
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Dec 29, 2009 16:49
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Oh man that remote looks awesome. Too bad I can't find it somewhere that'll ship to Canada 
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Dec 29, 2009 17:48
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Hey guys I am looking for comments on this HTPC I am thinking about building. SILVERSTONE Black 8.0mm aluminum front panel, 0.8mm SECC body GRANDIA GD04B Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case - Retail GIGABYTE GA-MA785GMT-UD2H AM3 AMD 785G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM3 65W Dual-Core Processor - Retail Crucial 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) 1.5 TB WD Green Hard Drive I want it to be able to play anything I throw at it, and it will also run utorrent, sabnzbd, and tversity to serve files to my xbox 360s, and possibly the occasional ripping. I assume this cpu/mobo/ram can handle that. I am also looking for other case recommendations. I am going to add a blu-ray drive in the future, and I would like something that can hold a modern video card if I decide to add one later. For now I need room for at least 2 hard drives.
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Dec 29, 2009 17:52
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WTFBEES posted:I ordered one of these the other day. drat thing won't ship until 1/6 though. Sure. It looks like it'd be just about perfect, but it'd be good to get some impressions before buying it.
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Dec 29, 2009 18:23
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Any opinions on the Zotac MAG HD-ND01? Very similar stats to the Acer Revo 3610 (which doesn't seem to be available anywhere anymore?) except no OS installed. The Zotac ION boards seem pretty popular around here, so has anyone tried this all in one? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856173001
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Dec 29, 2009 19:25
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choobs posted:Any opinions on the Zotac MAG HD-ND01? Very similar stats to the Acer Revo 3610 (which doesn't seem to be available anywhere anymore?) except no OS installed. The Zotac ION boards seem pretty popular around here, so has anyone tried this all in one? I've not used one myself, but from what I hear, yeah, it's pretty much like the Revo.
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Dec 29, 2009 19:44
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Schmoli posted:Ugh I give up using XBMC-Live and the Revo. the stability of the program just isn't anywhere near the original XBOX. I love (somewhat) being able to watch h264 and other HD files with it, and I really love that it's silent compared to my old XBOX, but it seems to lag a lot, crash, audio-hiccup, and just generally suck. I'll probably hook up an old monitor to the let guests browse or something (I've used 9.04-9.11, all have some sort of issue). I use XBMC pretty much flawlessly on my dual core Revo. I have it installed in Windows instead of using Live, though.
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Dec 29, 2009 20:21
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Thermopyle posted:I use XBMC pretty much flawlessly on my dual core Revo. I have it installed in Windows instead of using Live, though. Hmm, well maybe I can give that a try, I was afraid of the quality on the single-core revo.
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Dec 29, 2009 20:49
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nerox posted:Hey guys I am looking for comments on this HTPC I am thinking about building. I would recommend you go with a mobo that has on-board Nvidia 9xxx graphics for hardware acceleration on your video playback (especially if you choose to go the linux route). I don't know what the state of hardware acceleration is on ATI chipsets, but Nvidia appears to be leading the way The CPU you have should be able to handle pure-software decoding, but you might as well take advantage of hardware acceleration if you have the option.
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Dec 29, 2009 22:30
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vanilla slimfast posted:I would recommend you go with a mobo that has on-board Nvidia 9xxx graphics for hardware acceleration on your video playback (especially if you choose to go the linux route). I don't know what the state of hardware acceleration is on ATI chipsets, but Nvidia appears to be leading the way Is that neccessary with Win7? Intel boards seem to be the only option for onboard nvidia 9xxx and it looks like the Zotac board with a 9300 and an E3300 is about the same price point, which means I am going to be using DDR2 instead of DDR3 and have a slower processor. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813500019 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116264
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Dec 29, 2009 22:53
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nerox posted:Is that neccessary with Win7? The E5200 that the other fellow linked a few posts up is about the same price as the Celeron and should be roughly equivalent to the AMD. Personally, I think better software support is more valuable than memory speed for HTPC use.
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Dec 29, 2009 23:36
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 Big news for Apple TV owners who considered upgrading to a full-blown HTPC http://xbmc.org/davilla/2009/12/29/broadcom-crystal-hd-its-magic/ Apple TV now does 40 Mbps 1080p with the help of a $25 hardware decoder mini-pci card. It drops right in place of the built-in wifi card. The card (BCM970012) is now supported by XBMC on all 3 platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows) which makes it quite the game changer for HTPCs in my opinion. Other media projects such as FFmpeg, MythTV and Xine will soon follow as their developers add support. Search Ebay for BCM970012, best prices are around $25 with free shipping from HK. BCM970012 AKA Broadcom Crystal HD SPECIFICATIONS Form Factor PCI Express Mini Card (v1.3) Chipset AVC/MPEG-2/VC-1 Video/Audio Decoder: BCM70010 PCIe Controller: BCM70012 Supported Resolution QVGA up to 1920 x 1088 HD Video Decoding Formats H.264/AVC HP at L4.1 1080i/1080p, 40 Mb/sec. H.264/AVC HP at L3.0 480i/480p H.264/AVC HP at L3.2 720p SMPTE VC-1 AP at L3 1080i/1080p, 40 Mb/sec. WMV9 (VC-1 SP and MP) MPEG-2 MP at ML MPEG-2 MP at HL Uncompressed Video Output YUV 4:2:0, YUV 4:2:2 NV12 planar YPbPr format YUY2, UYVY-packed YPbPr format QVGA to full HD support Security AES-128-encrypted content over PCIe Uncompressed data encryption and scrambling support Firmware verification, data signature X.509 certificate Components H.264/MPEG-4 VC-1 Simple, Main, and Advanced Profile decoder MPEG-2 decoder Integrated security processor eames fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Dec 30, 2009 |
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Dec 30, 2009 11:28
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HD cable via HD PVR in Windows Media Center update: Stability has proven to be greatly improved over using the HD PVR in Sage. I also have yet to have the IR blaster "miss" a digit yet, though I still plan to shift over to firewire channel changing at some point. One nice thing I've found is that the DVBLink software allows me to reboot the HD PVR while I'm watching TV in WMC. Rather than cause the loving apocalypse like it did in Sage, I just get a little "HD_PVR Streaming Lost" dialog that goes away when I turn it back on. The occasional (maybe once a day) reboot is necessary to prevent audio and video from going out of sync. I'm curious to see if switching to digital audio rather than analog would solve this. If not, a wall outlet timer that makes the PVR restart every night at 3am would probably clear the issue. The bad news is I still have yet to get my ATSC tuner working alongside it, so my only tuner is the HD PVR. When I try to tune an over-the-air channel it tells me my tuner is busy. Hopefully there's some fix to this I just haven't found yet. When network shows come back next week I'd like the ability to record two at once. The DVBLink software includes an option to record audio in AAC rather than AC3. This could prove to be a useful workaround for the ZuneHD's loving stupid as hell "it plays WMC recordings but not with AC3 audio, so...you know..it doesn't really play WMC recordings" problem. Portable playback with minimal fuss would be a huge step forward.
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Dec 30, 2009 17:17
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moep posted:
That's pretty sweet! I've been toying with the idea of doing some upgrades to my current HTPC to take advantage of VDPAU (either replacing the video card or replacing the mobo with integrated video), but this might be a better short-term alternative. It doesn't look like MythTV has really done anything with this yet, but they jumped on the ball pretty quickly with VDPAU once it was available so I hope they do the same here.
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Dec 30, 2009 18:01
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