Can I upgrade my system to playback HD smoothly?

Sir Kaze

Hi, I possibly want to upgrade my current system so that it can play blu ray and hd files smoothly. I don't want to spend a lot of money on the system because, all I want to do is to playback HD content etc. I tried to play 1080 HD files but it stutters and isn't fun to watch.

If there is a way for my current system to play back HD without a upgrade that would be great.



My current system has a Asrock 939dual sata motherboard,1gb of ram, a Athlon 62 3200+ cpu, a 6600 GT card, a 480 watt Targan PSU, a Samsung SyncMaster 226BW 22inch TFT screen, running windows XP(might buy Windows XP media center), a 160 gig HD drive, a DvD rewriter drive(Will get a Blu/HD drive).

Any advice would be great! Thanks Sir Kaze.

Sir Kaze

Anyone? I really need to know if I can upgrade this system.

Loves2Watch

I have a similar setup and have no problems at all watching either standard DVD's or HD material. It might just be the codecs you are using. Try KL Mega codec pack and use the Media player classic that comes with it. I have found this to be the most reliable player for any HD material when others failed and/or skipped. Link - http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail...k/1080441198/1
Also, what items are running in the background (system tray)?

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Theater 1 - Panasonic TH-85PF12U Plasma TV, 6 Conrad Johnson LP275M Amps, Anthem Statement D-2 Pre/Pro, 6 Thiel SCS4 Speakers, 2 REL T-1 Subs, Infinity Interlude 120S Sub, Simaudio MOON Orbiter Universal Disc Player, ELP Laser Turntable, 2 Dish Network ViP 622 DVR's, Oppo BDP-83 Blu-ray Player, Onkyo DV-HD805 HD DVD Player.
Friends don't let friends buy Korean brand TV's.

tipstir

Have you OC (overclocked the AMD 64-bit 3200+) That's first place I start. How fast is the RAM in the system in MHz? The 160GB HDD is the stock or did you installed yourself? If you installed it yourself what is the Cache for it? Or does your MOBO (motherboard) support RAID/SATA or SATA? You might want to get SATA HDD which is faster than IDE Ultra ATA or PATA running at 100 to 133.

XP Pro and ((XP MCE (this one has better memory management and also has a service for MHN (Media Home Networking) if you play on sending audio and video streaming over your network to other network media players or to network PCs.))

Also place all OS/Program on C and then get another HDD like SATA to record your media to it on D:

Also shuttering could be either something is running in the background, CPU not fast enough, HDD could be fragmented, video card not fast enough or you don't have enough RAM? If you streaming over the network then you're using the default network buffers and haven't changed them?

Sir Kaze

I'm not quite sure how to overclock my AMD, and I installed my HDD, Its a IDE not sure what cache its got. Also my memory is pc 3200(400 mhz) I haven't defragmented in a long while because I caught a very nasty trojan.vundo but I was able to remove most of it.

The programs in my background are mostly the zone alarm firewall and Avira anti-virus, my commit charge is 422/2459 and I have 47 processes running.

Loves2Watch

Forget overclocking that processor, it is not necessarily a good thing to do unless you are skilled at it and can cause some serious problems. You seem to have enough of everything needed to run HD video as I previously stated, I have a very similar setup and things work fine. My one recommendation would be to remove Zone Alarm as it uses a large amount of resources and instead use Comodo Firewall. It is a free, professional firewall and works better than anything else out there that is free and better than many pay for professional firewalls. Other than that, and with using the K-Lite mega codec pack you should be able to do what you want smoothly.

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Theater 1 - Panasonic TH-85PF12U Plasma TV, 6 Conrad Johnson LP275M Amps, Anthem Statement D-2 Pre/Pro, 6 Thiel SCS4 Speakers, 2 REL T-1 Subs, Infinity Interlude 120S Sub, Simaudio MOON Orbiter Universal Disc Player, ELP Laser Turntable, 2 Dish Network ViP 622 DVR's, Oppo BDP-83 Blu-ray Player, Onkyo DV-HD805 HD DVD Player.
Friends don't let friends buy Korean brand TV's.

Nikopol

In theory there are rather cheap video cards available, that specificially support hardware accelleration for HD DVD/Blu-ray, especially the ATI Radeon HD 2600. No good for gaming, but useful for a htpc with a single core cpu. If you can get a card like this to work, you can use a single core cpu and get smooth BD/HD DVD playback. Remember to get a card with full HDCP support, if you want to stay "legal".

Sadly there are quite a few driver and other software problems, that can cause the playback software like PowerDVD to not use the hardware accelleration. Problems have been reported to vary from system to system and from os to os. I don't have a card like this, so i can't give you first hand experience.

My advise is to upgrade to a strong dual core cpu and do all the rendering in software, since it avoids the problem with the buggy hardware accelleration.

Datus

you say hd files, do you mean downloaded avi's of tv stuff?
If so get a decent media player, look for "media player classic" etc.

If you use power dvd, do you use the latest versions, if so you need 2GB not 1GB as it will page to disc.

Im not familar with AMD so cant help there.

But for intel 2.4GHz 2 core (or quad at 1.8) and memory 800mhz with fast timmings are required in addition to the above.

video card isnt too important. i use on board ati 1250 express and 1080P no issues.