What would you say is the minimum spec for HD movie playback ?

Mardoni · June 30, 2009, 13:19:02 PM

Im after building a little HTPC thats capable of playing back 1080p content.

I was wondering whether an AMD 64 CPU would do it ?

Rivkid · June 30, 2009, 13:59:02 PM

I used to run 720p content on my Athlon XP 3000. Was fine as long as it had all the resources and nothing else was going on. Had to use MPCStar though - WMP and VLAN were too slow.

Mardoni · June 30, 2009, 16:34:44 PM

I built a Core2Duo system a while back and that does it all fine but this time the system is for me and the budget is a damn sight tighter; its to go in new house.

Beaker · June 30, 2009, 16:56:16 PM

AMD 4400+ Energy efficient (Brisbane or similar power).
780G Chipset board
2 Gb RAM

That lot should cost around the £120 mark. Should be able to put something together for under £200 to be honest.

Pete · June 30, 2009, 18:44:43 PM

Would a dedicated gfx card take the worry away?

http://www.tekheads.co.uk/s/product?product=610145

I dunno

XEntity · June 30, 2009, 19:51:39 PM

Quote from: PeteWould a dedicated gfx card take the worry away?

http://www.tekheads.co.uk/s/product?product=610145

I dunno

Depends on the content, I expect that for HD/Blueray then the graphics card will (Not sure about the card above), and correctly encoded AVIs also, but some AVIs are not encoded in a way that the chipset recognises.

I have one of the 780G ASUS AMD boards and havent had any problems, but on some "h.264" AVIs get high CPU usage, others I do not, but nothing that causes any issues in playback.

(ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI 780G, Athlon64 X2 @2.5Ghz, 2GB RAM) - My setup with on-board graphics - rest of setup in sig, very quiet and very happy

Privateer · June 30, 2009, 21:17:17 PM

Cyberlink do a free adviser run that.
http://www.cyberlink.com/stat/technology/enu/next-gen-disc-solution.jsp

Mardoni · July 01, 2009, 09:43:54 AM

Nice one peeps, thanks

Beaker · July 01, 2009, 11:20:10 AM

Quote from: PeteWould a dedicated gfx card take the worry away?

http://www.tekheads.co.uk/s/product?product=610145

I dunno

The AMD 780 series have on-board hardware decoding for 1080p.

Kunal · July 01, 2009, 13:12:28 PM

This is what Im looking at for a bedroom HTPC.

I need it to play/stream HD from my server and from all accounts it can handle it well.

Zotac IonITX

http://techreport.com/articles.x/16893
http://www.silentpcreview.com/zotac-ion

Its an all in one ITX system based upon Nvidias Ion platform. It comes with an onboard 9400, Intel dual core Atom chip (1.6Ghz, although it can easily be overclocked to 2Ghz where its very stable), and pretty much onboard everything. You just need to drop in some ram and a hard drive! It even it includes a power adater

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductID=1012882
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-003-ZT

Im just looking for a nice little case to put it in.

Leon · July 01, 2009, 15:57:14 PM

On my dads PC (AMD 64 2000 - ATI 9600) .264s wont run happily in VLAN but found that Mplayer within SMPlayer works perfectly. (www.mplayerhq.hu)

Mardoni · July 01, 2009, 16:51:14 PM

I like the idea of those Ion boards but they are too expensive.

soopahfly · July 08, 2009, 10:58:39 AM

Ions would be ideal, as soon as they get them in Netbooks.

Kunal · July 08, 2009, 14:58:59 PM

The Lenovo S12 looks good.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/25/lenovos-449-ideapad-s12-first-netbook-with-nvidias-ion-chips/

News:

What would you say is the minimum spec for HD movie playback ?