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I was given the remnants of an old PC, and I am considering using it for an HTPC. The mobo is a ASUS p5ad2-e premium with a single core intel p4 running at 3.4 Ghz, with 2.5GB of DDR2 RAM. I have installed win7 pro as an OS, and it has an 80GB IDE HD housing the OS. Currently I have an old crappy video card in it, and it's rough enough that when I try to view full-screen video on my 20" LCD monitor, I get a BSOD on the execution of the screen expand. I also recently added a 1TB SATA WD green edition drive (64 MB cache), primarily as a means to house backups for other machines I have in my home network, although it will also now be the central store for all my media files.
Since this is an "extra" machine, and it seems to have decent horsepower in it, I was thinking about using this as a starter HTPC and media hub. I've also looked at using a cheap XFS Radeon 4350 card to help out with the graphics work. I selected this partly because of a severely limited budget, and I'm also constrained by needing to use component input on my TV (it's an old Sony kdp-65xbr2 RPTV, but it still works great), and this card has the 9 pin S-video port which will support component out . My concern is being able to play back both DVD's and possibly blueray in the future, through the component dongle attached to this port. My only other machine I can hook up with the component dongle (which came in my pile of used PC parts) is my wife's work laptop (older dell Inspirion), and it shuts off the output to the TV on DVD playback. Except for the inability to play DVD back on the TV screen, I was impressed by the screen clarity I was able to get through the component connection on a 65" TV. I'm not sure how DRM plays into feeding out copyrighted material from the PC to TV connections, or if this is related to the laptop's limitations. Should any decent modern card like the 4350 be able to stream HD upconverted output from both physical DVD's and ripped movie files? Is the age/speed of the rest of the system going to keep me from having a workable setup?
TIA, this forum has been a tremendous resource for learning about how to build my HT so far!
Since this is an "extra" machine, and it seems to have decent horsepower in it, I was thinking about using this as a starter HTPC and media hub. I've also looked at using a cheap XFS Radeon 4350 card to help out with the graphics work. I selected this partly because of a severely limited budget, and I'm also constrained by needing to use component input on my TV (it's an old Sony kdp-65xbr2 RPTV, but it still works great), and this card has the 9 pin S-video port which will support component out . My concern is being able to play back both DVD's and possibly blueray in the future, through the component dongle attached to this port. My only other machine I can hook up with the component dongle (which came in my pile of used PC parts) is my wife's work laptop (older dell Inspirion), and it shuts off the output to the TV on DVD playback. Except for the inability to play DVD back on the TV screen, I was impressed by the screen clarity I was able to get through the component connection on a 65" TV. I'm not sure how DRM plays into feeding out copyrighted material from the PC to TV connections, or if this is related to the laptop's limitations. Should any decent modern card like the 4350 be able to stream HD upconverted output from both physical DVD's and ripped movie files? Is the age/speed of the rest of the system going to keep me from having a workable setup?
TIA, this forum has been a tremendous resource for learning about how to build my HT so far!