Will my HTPC be able to display Blu-Ray?

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I really don't know at this point. I was thinking of going with AMD because they make some good cheap low power processors that are easy to cool.

I'm not using my current computer as a DVR, mainly just to stream movies from my main PC in my office and play a few old school emulated games. The processor I have now is only single core 2.0GHz, but it works for what I need it to do. I'm just using onboard sound and it is only hooked up through the TV, since I don't have a sound system in my living room.

I was using an old P4 1.4GHz with 384MB of RAM for this purpose, but it was struggling, so I bought my current set up off of craigslist for cheap.

I really like that Antec case. I've been looking at a couple different Shuttle barebones, they are tiny.
 


Recent stepping Core 2 Duos use less power for the work performed, so anyone looking to build a high-performance HTPC might want to think about performance-per-watt, rather than just watts, before building.
 
I upgraded my video card to a Radeon HD 4650 and tried to play 1080p .mkv files, but the video is very choppy and CPU usage is at 100%. I have K-lite codec pack installed but I want to know if the video card is actually doing the decoding instead of the CPU. Any ideas? Do I need to install something else besides the catalyst drivers for AVIVO?
 


It sounds like you're using CPU decoding only.
 
I've been having problems with a HD 3650 AGP with Avivo. I just found out that it can only decode VC-1, and H.264 with the newest ver. of PowerDVD or MPC-HC. WMV and MPEG2 encoding is not yet developed for MPC_HC tho.
 
MPEG2 decoding is supported. With hardware decoding, there 2 crucial factors:
1) the program playing the video has DXVA acceleration enabled. This is DirectX Video Acceleration.
2) The video was encoded to VC-1, H.264 or MPEG2 AND was encoded using proper settings.

MKV is only a container and can hold Xvid, Dvix, MPEG2, H.264 and some others. Download MKVToolnix and install. Then drag the video files into it that are causing these problems and report back what Video Codec is being used as well as the audio codec.

Something I noticed recently was that Quicktime files encoded in H.264 were not being hardware decoded.
 
I just tested a bonus video from Blu Ray Batman -DK which is a H.264 Elementary Stream and about 20% of my 4 cores were being used to play it. However, a 720p 1.09GB downloaded TV show uses 0% which uses H.264.

Playing a DVD with MPC-HC used 0%.

I think what we can take from this is that it might be a hit or miss when playing Hi-Def video. If a video was properly encoded, then we should be fine. I just can't believe that the studio would screw up encoding the Batman bonus video, which is the largest and longest bonus video on the disc. However, the actual movie is VC-1 and doesn't use CPU at all.
 
I just tested with WMVs downloaded from Movielink and Amazon and none of them use the CPU.

I also tested a 720x3xx(DVD size) H.264 movie encoded from a Blu Ray down to 700MB and it used 5-6% of the CPU.

I forgot to add that I have a 8800GT 512.

When I talked about Quicktime video, I was using MPC-HC to play them.

"Not all H.264 and MPEG2 are created equally."
 
+1, A tutorial was meantioned earlier in this thread that helped me alot, thanks! H.264 can be decoded perfectly using a player called Media Player Classic - Home Cinema. But not all can be decoded. Certain files can't be accelerated with Avivo (ATI) while most of all can be decoded with Puervideo (Nvidia). I haven't tried MPEG-2 or VC-1 yet. Heres a great site for HD quicktime trailers that'll test your GPUs encoding power. For whoever owns or makes the site and its contents, thanks so much!

http://www.davestrailerpage.co.uk
 
Now I'm confused. Do you need to "encode" these videos in a different format and then watch them to test the GPU? Or do I just attempt to play one of them "as-is" and the GPU "Decoding" will work provided that I am using the right software?
 
So my bad, I meant that the graphics card will decode the file with its acceleration technology, i.e Purevideo, Avivo. The video does not need to be encoded.
 
Thanks for the help. I was able to play the X-Men Origins Wolverine trailer on my 46" LCD and it looked amazing, no skipping or anything. I wasn't able to play it with MPC-HC though. I installed PowerDVD 9 and was able to use the Avivo decoding through their software. Is there a specific setting in MPC that I am missing or do I need to install a specific codec?
 
Ok I spoke too soon. The video played fine and and didn't skip this time, but the processor usage is still jumping up to 100% and when I look in Catalyst Control Center, the GPU usage is at 0. When I pressed play the second time, the computer locked up and I had to reboot.

I've read about people having problems with hardware acceleration using Windows XP. Do you think I should install Windows 7 beta and try it?
 
Nah, I have Windows XP and its playing great. And yes PowerDVD has its own decoder thing for Avivo. What version are you running? Make sure you have the latest MPC-HC and read this tutorial closely

http://nunnally.ahmygoddess.net/watching-h264-videos-using-dxva/
 
Update - I installed Windows 7 and PowerDVD 9 and hardware decoding works great. CPU% is at about 10% with hardware decoding on and goes to 100% with it turned off. I still haven't gotten it to work yet on Windows XP, but I've yet to try the tutorial for MPC-HC.
 
It is a little bit slower than XP booting up, but for playing video I can't tell any difference. Now that I have hardware decoding working on Windows 7, HD video looks even better.
 
Yeah, when connecting my HTPC rig to my friend's HDTV it looks pretty ugly. I want to run Win 7 but I don't know the requirements and I doubt it'll run fast on my CPU.
 
Here are the minimum requirements for Windows 7

* 1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
* 1 GB of RAM (32-bit); 2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
* 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit); 20 GB of avaiable disk space (64-bit)
* DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

I'm using the 32bit verision. I would say you should be able to run Windows 7 just fine. The only problem might be your graphics card, but you could always set it up to dual-boot XP and Win7 like I have. Then you can use both and when RC1 expires you don't have to reinstall XP.
 
Well those specs in my signature aren't my HTPC rig, here is my rig.

2.4oGHz Pentium 4 Single Core CPU
250GB HDD
1GB DDR RAM
HD 3650 AGP

How will I know what drivers to install? Since my card is AGP the drivers from ATi are for PCIe cards........

PS. Yeah I have another hard drive for Win 7, the 250GB will be XP and a 40GB will be Win 7
 
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