1080p Playback Hardware

Please let this serve as the sister thread to the 720p

I currently run xbmc via Ubuntu 7.10 on a p4 3.2Ghz HT with 1GB of Ram. I have a Nvidia 7600GS Video Card.

Most 720P with AC3 plays back very nice. I can play 1080p but it is really really choppy. Figured it would fail with the P4 but tried anyways. So I have decided to upgrade my Systems. First I bought a popcorn hour a-110 but the interface if painful so I have sold it.

Here is my planned Hardware:

GIGABYTE GA-M78SM-S2H nVidia GeForce 8200
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 2MB Cache 89W Retail
OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 800MHz 2GB (2x1024)
COOLER MASTER Hyper 212

From my research this should be sufficient for 1080p I would just like to verify before I layout the cash.

Thanks JKing

I'd imagine that'd get the job done.

That setup will play 90% of 1080p content. Bumping up the clock to 3.3ghz will play 95% but i recomend going intel with a E8400. That will play 99% of 1080p standard clock with plenty of room to overclock. Intel is definatly worth the extra cash.

cheers

Couldn't one get by with a lesser cpu and a gpu that offloads most of the HD video processing from the cpu to the gpu?

I don't know much about this stuff (yet) but I don't see why we need such a fast cpu when cards are out there that seem to say they can handle HD.

Take these new cards for example:
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3420

I tried XBMC Live on several PC and I like it
I decided to build a barebone PC to upgrade my old xbox/xbmc. So I started to search components to build one.
My goal is a box with 1080p playback and multichannel support.

The chosen components are:

Asus P3-P5G33 barebone http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=1&l...odelmenu=2
Intel E8400 (3GHz Dual core)
Cheap Nvidia 8400GS or 8500GT PCIe low profile VGA, with HDMI out
2 GB of DDR2 RAM

I don't need hard drive to the box. It will boot from an USB pendrive and play content over the network.

Does anyone confirm me, that this machine with XBMC Live, will play all 1080p content smoothly?

sion28 Wrote:Couldn't one get by with a lesser cpu and a gpu that offloads most of the HD video processing from the cpu to the gpu?

I agree with sion28. Here is my setup:

Intel core 2 duo E4500 @ 2.2ghz
NVidia 8400GS 512mb based Zebronics card
3gb DDR2

While XBMC on Hardy playback is speedy with no audio, XBMC Live rocks . Even 1080p is plays absolutely fine.

Dont know if 3gb ram helped in anyway, for Live 1gb should be fine.

XBMC does not use any gpu acceleration at all, so everything depends on the cpu. Menaing you'd just waste your money buying an expensive card for this purpose.

Do these Nvidia cards output audio via HDMI? I read some other threads that indicated there are some limitations..

Save money o RAM if you can, But previous AMD fan, Have tried way too many ADM x2 finally gave up and got the E8400, Plays All 1080p, even extreme tests. If you run live, like I do with just CD/DVD and pen drive for Live you only need 512MB ram, never seen my system using more than 400mb. uSING pny Nvidia 8500 card with dvi - hdmi on 65" DLP, see no difference to Blue ray

I've just compiled the latest SVN that now uses dual cores and my HTPC can even playback the 'killa sample' at full speed whereas before it would run at about 16FPS.

This is it -

Dell Vostro 200 - Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.33GHz - 2.00 GB RAM - Radeon HD 2400 graphics card

Hope that helps.