What are my limitations on my HTPC?

Ok so I still have some stuff coming in the mail, so I figure I'd at least ask here first before I get any surprises.

AMD 3400 2.2ghz skt 939 (Single Core - Will probably OC to about 2.6ghz)
DFI Ultra-D SLI
2x1gb PC3200 Corsair
ATI HD3650 w/dual HDMI
500gb 7200rpm 16mb Cache HD
Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 (got it free, so figure I'd throw it in there)

The ONLY use of this computer is strictly for movies. I will decode the DVD's onto my hard drive, than use VLC most likely to play them. This is for a 46" Sanyo 1080p LCD TV.

Will my system be enough for Blueray? Will it be OK to record live TV and use it as a DVR? What programs would work to use it as a DVR?

I don't have Bluray, so I don't know how the HD3650 will do if you use the hardware acceleration, but I think you'll need to use something other than VLC to take advantage of that. Don't quote me on that though, my 8800gts won't do acceleration at all so I don't really know. From what I've heard, if you are just going to software decoding (not using the gfx card), then your dual core will be cutting it close. But again, I have no experience with the HD/Bluray side of HTPC affairs.

Personally, if I were going to be using it as an HTPC only, then I'd get some sort of front end and not just use VLC. I've been using MediaPortal to play my ripped dvd collection, and it has some really good plugins that make it a great front end for both movies and TV recording. LandShark really has more experience with it than I do, but I'd be glad to answer any of your questions on that kind of stuff.

Sorry I couldn't really give you good feedback on the system, but I do think it'll do pretty well with you are wanting to do. Best of luck!

stang8118 said:

Will my system be enough for Blueray? Will it be OK to record live TV and use it as a DVR? What programs would work to use it as a DVR?

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the 3650 should give you good HA for Blurays. however, it still needs a supported software player in order for the HA kicks in tho. afaik, VLC doesn't support HA (I could be wrong tho....). some version of MPC-HD does I believe (as long as you don't use subtitle as subtitle breaks HA in most non commerical player I believe). PowerDVD, WinDVD, etc., will all give you HA support.

it should be ok for recording Live(SD)TV and use as PVR. I used to have PVR-500 (it's a dual tuner version of PVR150) for the DirceTV STB too. for recording LiveTV, it's not much of processing power needed, as pretty much most if not all tuner card is hardware encoding base. so, the card will do the encoding, not the CPU.

I've been a BeyondTV user for almost 5 yrs now, and love it, ease of use, good functionality. I can even set up last minute recording via my iPhone away from home in case I forgot to set up recording. another good PVR software is SageTV. played around w/ it last year, another good solid PVR software. but I don't like the MediaCenter section of the SageTV tho (even w/ SageMC plugin). for the main front end, I use MediaPortal. simple to set up, great to look at, and it just works.

I can't confirm since I don't have personal experience with it, but I've read that the 3650 can decode 720p material but has trouble with 1080p.

Can't imagine a 3650 having issues with 1080p video unless it's a specific problem to that model of card. I have two 2600s that can do it perfectly fine with very low end C2D in each.

Curious... what bitrate are the 1080p videos, how much CPU usage, and what filter?

MPC-HC (its HC not HD its short for Home Cinema) is the only way I have gotten DXVA running. (hardware accelelration)

It uses approximately 3% of my GPU to play 720p files. (I have a 1080i screen so I play everything at 720p)

I took the MPC-HC codecs and installed them manually into my system for playback in any player I want (VMC and WMP). However I may have over done it though as I installed ALL of the codecs, and it causes problems with aspect ratio (not a big deal since Media center has a "zoom" button), also causes green smear in the thumbnail previews (play back seems just fine though)

With hardware acceleration ff/rw skip all supposedly have a lag to them (up to 30 seconds I have seen reported) although I have not noticed anything that long.

I have since installed FFDshow again which breaks DXVA because you can not have software post processing in hopes to fix some of the issues MPC had. When I have free time I will try and tune the codecs and repost them.

I thought FFDShow replaces MPCVideoDec in the filter chain completely. I didn't know that you could use it just for post-processing. Can you show me how you did that? I'm using the DivX H.264 filter for some of my slower machines, but would like to use some of FFDShow's features.

tgxiii said:

I thought FFDShow replaces MPCVideoDec in the filter chain completely. I didn't know that you could use it just for post-processing. Can you show me how you did that? I'm using the DivX H.264 filter for some of my slower machines, but would like to use some of FFDShow's features.

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I beleive that is correct. There is no point installing MPC codecs if you have ffdshow installed. (Ffdshow is better anyway, it just needs a good CPU for HD playback..)

for 720p my x2 3600 does the trick Dont know about 1080p (theoretically it should be about 60% CPU usage on a stock 3600x2.. since 720p = 20-25%

On a fresh install and only one time installing FFDshow I was able to watch all of my AVI files on a 750MHZ duron system I have. at 1440x900. However after uninstalling and reinstalling FFDshow, it got broke, and now has trouble at anything past 1024x768 Pretty sure it has a bad uninstaller, because I started noticing things like double FFDshow icons in the systray)

tgxiii said:

I can't confirm since I don't have personal experience with it, but I've read that the 3650 can decode 720p material but has trouble with 1080p.

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Running MPC with the K-Lite 4.x full pack installed I haven't had any issues decoding 1080 with the 3650 on my HTPC, so I don't think this is the case unless it's something to do with VLC or a codec issue.

I was talking about hardware acceleration on the 3650, so it has nothing to do with VLC.

What bitrate are those 1080p videos you're playing and what filter? (K-Lite installs a ton... but which one is being used?)

Okay... disregard what I said about the 3650. I was getting it confused with the 3450. And on top of that mistake (sigh) I erroneously thought the 3450 had the same video decoding power as the 2400 since its core was just a die-shrink of the 2400's core.

Ok after reading through all of the posts (many thanks for taking the time out to reply) it seems it'll handle it for pretty much what I need it for. I was going to pick up a BluRay player the other day from BB for $80 (internal drive with 2 or 4x burn speed too), but after browsing for good blurays I decided to wait till next year before I make the leap to Bluray. Doesn't seem that any movie that I like is out on Bluray yet lol.

So probably for now I will be sticking with DVD's, and just using a media player to upscale the resolution to look as best as possible on my 1080p TV. Can't wait till all the parts come in the mail (probably by Friday), cause I can't wait to use it