Video card to playback HD

[dmanindfw]

I originally had a 7300 GS but it wasn't enough for HD playback...a lot of stuttering and artifacts. Bumped up to a Nvidia 8500GT card and now have great HD playback. I am hopeful that one day I will upgrade to Blu-ray. Not sure whether or not an 8500 will cut it, but according to several posts here and on avs forums, looks like it SHOULD work.

[mmatheny]

What about a BFG9400GT 512mb PCI-E 2.0?? Or an XFX7900 PCI-E 2.0?? Or a BFG 9600OC 512mb PCI-E 2.0?

[mvallevand]

I can't remember who it is around here who said he's stopped helping people with low-end equipment because 95% of the time the problem is the equipment but the person keeps wanting to band-aid it and pray for miracles.

I am sure I have said that to people who are sure their low-end machines will do what they want with a few tweaks and registry changes. I prefer the term alchemy rather than divine intervention, but I'm still willing to help to a point.

Martin

[lemming]

As I understand it (and may be mistaken) the hardware is only as important as the codec used to decode the HD content. I thought you had to have something like Power DVD 8 or similar to actually enable the hardware acceleration??

[morser]

Both are just as important I would think.
In the beginning, I was using a low (and I mean low) end card for proof of concept. it was an old ATI AGP1x card. With the help from this board, I used software decoders to get the thing to work.
Then I got an ATI 1550x card. it still really depended on the codec used to decode. After trying the PowerDVD one, as well as any others I could get my hands on, I settled on the FFDSHOW one provided in the K-lite codec pack. I had to configure the codec skip frames though, otherwise the audio would be out of sync with the video after a few minutes of playback. By skip frame I mean it skips frames so little you don't notice, but over time, it added up to a problem.

Side note: to me, the PowerDVD codec seemed to FUZZ over the 1080i OTA signal, making it look like it went through filtering to make it different. I was looking for the raw clairity of the 1080i signal to come through. I found that in FFDSHOW.

[lemming]

I settled on the FFDSHOW one provided in the K-lite codec pack. I had to configure the codec skip frames though, otherwise the audio would be out of sync with the video after a few minutes of playback. By skip frame I mean it skips frames so little you don't notice, but over time, it added up to a problem.

Can you list what you needed to change to make this work?? I didn't think FFDShow provided any hardware acceleration. A free option is always a good thing!!

[morser]

shooooot. you are possibly right.

I use VMR9 as Video Renderer,
and
for Video Decoder I use FFDSHOW.

But to answer your question, In the FFDSHOW config near the bottom there is an option to skip frames. Mine is set to skip a frame every 1000ms if needed.