Watching HD "stuff"

[psycik]

I've been looking around at big tvs and are leaning towards an HD capable one. Not for HDTV which I'm not sure when that will become available over here, but other HD stuff, movie trailers etc, HD movies when they start getting a bit more popular, WMV HD etc.

Does anybody know what "bits" I'll need to make this go? And what sort of machine specs? I've tried some stuff, but found it quite laggy but I'm only on an Athlon 1800 Xp running to tv out on an MX440 video card.

Basically want an idea of if there are hardware decoding video cards? What "size" video card I should be running,and whether I need to get a faster CPU?

Cheers

[HtV]

You might want to check this forum: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=26
Rather complicated sometimes, but they seem to know what they are talking about.
I must say until recently I was quite sure a crt-tv was better than a lcd or plasma one. A few weeks ago my son bought a lcd tv and I must say i was surprised by the quality. otoh, for that price, it should be good of course.

[lonegeek]

Well my amd xp 2200+ cant handle a 1080p video...but a pentium moble 1.6ghz can.... Weird...

[psycik]

What's the difference in the video cards?? And I was wondering if pushing out to an Svideo connection was "harder work" for a PC that a DVI connection.

[sub]

svideo/composite will only every be outputting standard PAL/NTSC signals.

I connect to a plasma panel with DVI, which gives you the advantage of a fully readable desktop (rock solid picture), good colour etc.

[lajams]

As far as video cards doing hardware decoding, I seem to remember that either the new NVidia cards or the new ATI cards have onboard MPEG decoding. I'll try to dig up the specs.

Billy.

NVidia does this on the 6600 series on up: http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html

ATI claims to do this same thing with their Video Shader technology, but doesn't say to what extent its done in software (no link there, sorry).

I've seen the MPeg decoding on the 6600 series in person and I can vouch for its effectiveness as far as offloading goes...very minimal cpu. But I have not experienced the ATI Video Shader stuff, so I cannot vouch for it there. I'm an ATI owner myself but my card doesn't have the specific technology to do mpeg decoding.

[psycik]

aah yes been wondering if i should start looking at new vid cards...better get the tv first then worry about what I'm gonna put on it.