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Hi all,
I have seen here and there a few people who are slightly disappointed with the vid quality of XBMC and as such use external players.
Am I right in thinking this will only make a difference if using software decoding. At the minute I only have a little Revo box and whilst I want the best possible image quality I am not going to look in to the process of setting up an external player if it makes no difference what-so-ever.
Cheers,
Michael
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I am not sure exactly what you are asking but I will give it a go...
I presently have a Patriot Box Office (flashed w AC Ryan firmware). As far as picture quality goes it depends upon the quality of the media being played. The old, "garbage in, garbage out" saying.
There are a number of other factors effecting picuter quality which leads everyone to YMMV: upscaling and downscaling, type & quality of the make/model of the TV... quality of wires, connections...
I am building my first XBMC so I can get more control over the device and do more with it than the stand alone media players are capable of. A lot of these devices are limited by the chipset maker. Realteck is highly secretive and slow to roll out fixes and improvements... Thus open source, modding and such is somewhat limited.
I got the thing working to my liking about two years ago and haven't really messed with it (internally) since (watch stuff on it all the time). I used to be real active in the PBO forums. Last I checked the LAN driver on the Realteck chipsets were still terrible. Transfer speeds are abysmal and not even scaring spec (wired or wireless). It's saving grace is the onbaord HDD to watch HD movies from there. Of course it takes 15 min. to get the 7-8Gb movie on it... Same movie takes 5 min to transfer to my NAS.
I think they are good entry level devices and they are a lot cheaper than building your own htpc.
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thanks for the reply, I should have made myself clearer first off.
I am currently using a Revo ion box which can only play 720/1080 content using hardware decoding. I know a lot of people use xbmc to launch an external player (generally MPC-HC or DSPlayer/Codec). My main question really is, before I go to the length of setting either of these up and testing could anyone confirm whether or not I am right in thinking I will see absolutely no difference as my card is doing the decoding so both will be identical. Hope that makes sense...
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Will you see a difference between something like DSPlayer and the internal player? Yes. Will it be an improvement? I don't know. I don't think it's worth the effort of setting up DSPlayer, trying to configure it just right, for the minor improvement that you may see.
