HTPC upgrade custom tailored for ffdshow

I thought this was a fairly easy question for those who know more than I. Doesn't anyone know whether the video card processing is an integral part of making ffdshow work as you would hope it would?

JP: My understanding is that ffdshow is all CPU. From what i've read, it takes the output from a software DVD player before it reaches the video card, processes it with whatever settings you set, and then outputs that processed result to the video card. My understanding is that the processing is all algorithms, and all that is pretty much raw CPU power.


A Radeon LE works fine (i use it), but the newer cards apparently have an even better picture (again, that's the impression i get from what i've read here).


Hope that helps.

Thanks Gertjan...this is exactly the information I was looking for. I hope others can confirm this as well. I must admit I almost feel silly doing an upgrade to use a P4 2.4Ghz cpu and 512 megs of PC2700 ram with a Radeon LE but if it doesn't call for a better video card so be it

Owen - Although not related to ffdshow, that is a good point to keep in mind about video cards. My old LE is not going to cut it anymore when i want to jump in and do some of that newer stuff on my HTPC.


JP - i am facing a similar dilemma of feeling silly to upgrade the HTPC from 1GHz and keeping the LE But i'll keep the LE until i really need a video card with "special" hardware support for certain technologies. Until then, i'm just enjoying my 1GHz + LE


BTW - i ran ffdshow on my machine for a little while, but turned it off again. To me, it seemed that half of the movies i watched looked great with ffdshow, but the other half got much stronger halos (EE-type stuff), which bothered me. Since i did not like having to switch ffdshow on or off each time i start a DVD, i decided to just leave it off. (Maybe that's something they can build into the next TT: next to the movie start point and aspect ratio, it can also remember if you want to use ffdshow or not?)

ffdshow Resize with Coma-Luma Sharpen filter dose not have the problems that other sharpen filters have. It's in a different league and is not to be missed.

With a 1G machine you could never have tried it.

ffdshow Resize-Sharpen is much more usefull than VMR9 so keep the LE and see how you go with just upgrading the rest of the system.


Regards,


Owen