What do I need to upgrade to watch HDTV?

[dinki]

Hey guys, I've been toying with the idea of adding a HomerunHD tuner to my system but am finding that my system is underpowered in playing back HD streams. I tested by downloading a 720p program from alt.binaries.hdtv and found that the program played back extremely slowly in the video library plugin. However, when I played it back using mplayer it played back much smoother but still not smooth enough.

My current set up is AMD Athlon XP 2000+, ECS K7S5APro, 1 gig SDRAM, ATI Radeon 9550 Svid Out. What would give me the best advantage? A faster processor or an upgrade on the video card? As always, I'm trying to do this on a minimal budget so cost is of great concern.

[sub]

I'd say you would need a faster CPU and faster video card. You might possibly be able to get by with that CPU (using Overlay video renderer), but it would be very marginal.

[dinki]

Not exactly the answer I wanted to hear, but I guess that's what I suspected. I guess the HDTV will have to wait another day.

[JimF]

It used to be the case in the dim past that video ran better on Intel chips and Intel chipsets than on AMD chips and various other chipsets (VIA, etc.). I don't know if that is still true or not, but I suspect it is to some extent. I can usually do h.264 at 720p on mine using Quicktime 7, for example, at about 60% CPU usage. It is not quite enough for 1080 however.

[nbarsley]

JimF, How much ram do you have in your system?

[dinki]

It used to be the case in the dim past that video ran better on Intel chips and Intel chipsets than on AMD chips and various other chipsets (VIA, etc.). I don't know if that is still true or not, but I suspect it is to some extent. I can usually do h.264 at 720p on mine using Quicktime 7, for example, at about 60% CPU usage. It is not quite enough for 1080 however.

Excuse my ignorance, but how do you record in h.264 at 720p? Somehow you can set this as your preference? I'd like to try my system with a file recorded with these parameters. Any idea where I might find a small sample?

[flyswatta]

I bought an old satellite tuner that allows for HD OTA without the satellite side being active - cost me $60 on Craigslist. It downconverts the HD OTA to SD, then out via SVideo to my Emuzed MAUI III.

While it's technically not HD anymore, it's better than any analog picture I've seen and plays back fine on my AMD 2100+ with ATI 9700 Video card using VLC.

Anyway, $60 for the receiver, $15 for serial ir blaster. Pretty cheap solution compared to upgrading computer hardware - food for thought.

Here's a link to a list of receivers that have been tested as being able to receive HD without active satellite.

http://home.att.net/~roashru/Directv.html

I basically started copy/pasting the tuners models into Ebay and Craigslist until I found one that was in my price range.