HTPC Issue - Choppiness

[Ladicius]

Howdy,

I got this package here, fired it up and everything works great, gonna take some time getting used to the remote though and beyond tv is an excellent tool, just wish there were more options for recording and what not.

Heres my problem, I can get the HDTV and what not, but when I start to watch live tv, it's a little choppy, not too much, but enough to sort of piss you off.

My system specs are in my sig and I am wondering if you guys can suggest what my biggest problem area is and what I could get to remedy this choppiness issue. Keep in mind I am using an AGP mobo and I am not really looking to buy a new mobo/proc, so the "need a new system" won't be a viable option for me

Thanks in advance guys and thanks for all the help you have given to get me this far.

- Jacob

 

[JBark]

It's got to be the video card. With a Radeon 9000 in my HTPC, watching HD was exactly like you descibe (1080i signals were worse than 720p). Since the card didn't accelerate anything, the CPU was forced to do all the work, and my 2.2GHz AthlonXP just wasn't fast enough. I switched to a 6800GT, and CPU usage dropped dramatically (I'm in the 30%-40% range with a 1.8 XP now), since it was able to offload pretty much all the MPEG decoding to the card.

This is with MCE and PureVideo, I'm assuming that BeyondTV is similar. If it is, then just about an recent ATI or nVidia card would work fine. This page is good for figuring out what feature are accelerated on nVidia cards.
http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html

For just OTA HD, you'll want at least HD MPEG-2 decoding and the Spatial-Temporal De-Interlacing. Without that HD de-interlacing support, 1080i channels can look pretty bad (onboard 6150 video is an example of this). Note that cards like my 6800GT and the 6800 Ultra have defective chips, so they can't hardware decode H.264 or WMV videos.

Something like a 6600GT or maybe even a 7600GS for nVidia. I think for ATI you'd want at least an x1600, since I'm not sure if the x1300s will accelerate all the HD resolutions. 6600GTs go for like $50-$75 here on the forums, I think that's what I would go with.

 

[Ladicius]

Anyone else wanna chime in before I take the jump on a new video card? Thanks for the last reply, very helpful and informative. That link is a great way to look at what one would need for an HDTV system.