[taekwonjohn36]

Hello, fellow nerds. I've just completed my first ever HTPC build. I've built plenty of desktops in the past but this is my first HTPC and also my first build of any kind in 4 years. What I hope to achieve with this machine is to replace my WD Player and have a few extra bells and whistles. I intend to use XBMC to organize and play all of my movies, tv shows and music which I have stored on external HDDs. I also intend to play emulated games (up to PS2, possibly Wii quality) with Hyperspin. Last, I'd like to be able to launch Steam out of XBMC. I've loaded all the software and everything seems to run properly. However, it is not quite optimal for showtime yet. Here is what I need advice on:

1. VIDEO: Research convinced me that the APU on my processor would suffice for an HTPC with light gaming capabilities. Yet video quality is not as good as my tiny WD player when playing 1080p movies. Resolution seems to look fantastic on stills, but as soon as there's a little action, it seems to look a little blurred and unnatural with movement. Also, navigating menus seems to get unbearably laggy in XBMC and doesn't seem to refresh very fast at all when loading artwork. My instinct tells me it's all due to the APU not being powerful enough. I'm inclined to buy a dedicated card but it has to be low profile and hopefully be more than powerful enough to handle all the things I mentioned that I'd like to do without any lag. Any suggestions on a card? It has to fit a low profile case so I'm not sure how powerful those things can be these days. Am I even on the right track with buying a vid card or is there something else I'm missing? Please help!

2. INPUT: I was leaning toward Flirc and my existing universal remote (which currently controls my PS3 and TV). However, I would need it plug it into a back port since I need the 2 front ports for controllers. Hence, no line of sight for the IR receiver. Anyone know of any decent remotes for HTPC that work will with Windows 8.1 and XBMC? I browsed Amazon and couldn't find anything except for the Logitech harmony remotes but I'm not looking to spend that kind of money.

3: Right now my sound and video are going to 2 separate places. HDMI directly to the TV and optical from the sound card to the AVR. The reason for this is because the difference in picture quality is night and day between routing HDMI through the receiver and going direct to the TV. Sound is no issue either way. However, going directly to the TV poses a problem because I lose 3D capability. Anything stereoscopic 3D must go through the receiver because I have several 3D capable devices (PS3, WD, etc.) and the 3D adapter only has on HDMI input. Again, I think the intolerable loss in video quality may be due to lack of GPU power. Any advice there?

Thanks to all in advance who may be kind enough to help me in my quest to create this dream machine successfully. It's been a passion project I've been wanting to take on for years so I'm really hoping to perfect it.

Here are my theater specs:

HTPC HARDWARE:
-Silvertone ML03B HTPC case
-MSI FM2-A75MA-E35 motherboard
-AMD A10-6800K 4.1GHZ Quad Core Processor (Radeon 8670D APU)
-8GB (4x2) G.Skill Sniper DDR3 2133 RAM
-ASUS Xonar DG 5.1 card
-Kingston 120GB SSD (OS, Frontends, Emulators)
-WD Blue 1TB HDD 6GBS (Roms, Media)
-Antec Gold 450W PSU

SOFTWARE:
-Windows 8.1 OEM
-XBMC Frodo (front end)
-Hyperspin (emulation)
-Steam (modern gaming)

DISPLAY & SOUND:
-65" Mitsubishi 3D Ready DLP (2010)
-Mitsubishi 3DA Adapter (converts SBS/OU to checkerboard)
-Yamaha AVR (2010)
-Klipsch RF series 5.1 speaker set-up

[LazerBlue]

You must have since kind of setting messed up because I have the A10-5700K and I have no issue's at all. It does everything I throw at it and more. I even tried out Battlefield 4 on it when it first came out and it ran it pretty decently. Do you have all the latest drivers installed?

[bluray]

1. VIDEO: Research convinced me that the APU on my processor would suffice for an HTPC with light gaming capabilities. Yet video quality is not as good as my tiny WD player when playing 1080p movies. Resolution seems to look fantastic on stills, but as soon as there's a little action, it seems to look a little blurred and unnatural with movement. Also, navigating menus seems to get unbearably laggy in XBMC and doesn't seem to refresh very fast at all when loading artwork. My instinct tells me it's all due to the APU not being powerful enough. I'm inclined to buy a dedicated card but it has to be low profile and hopefully be more than powerful enough to handle all the things I mentioned that I'd like to do without any lag. Any suggestions on a card? It has to fit a low profile case so I'm not sure how powerful those things can be these days. Am I even on the right track with buying a vid card or is there something else I'm missing? Please help!

Have you download the latest AMD driver from here- AMD Driver Autodetect, then disable everything other smooth playback in CCC Video Quality.

3: Right now my sound and video are going to 2 separate places. HDMI directly to the TV and optical from the sound card to the AVR. The reason for this is because the difference in picture quality is night and day between routing HDMI through the receiver and going direct to the TV. Sound is no issue either way. However, going directly to the TV poses a problem because I lose 3D capability. Anything stereoscopic 3D must go through the receiver because I have several 3D capable devices (PS3, WD, etc.) and the 3D adapter only has on HDMI input. Again, I think the intolerable loss in video quality may be due to lack of GPU power. Any advice there?

Connecting HTPC-->AVR-->HDTV using HDMI is the best way to get the best AQ/PQ. If you don't want AVR to mess up PQ, you can set it to pass through video.

-AMD A10-6800K 4.1GHZ Quad Core Processor (Radeon 8670D APU)

-ASUS Xonar DG 5.1 card

With proper driver and configuration, PQ is comparable to PS3. I prefer bitstreaming audio using onboard HDMI than going through sound card. I trust the more expensive AVR to decode and process audio than a sound card....

[taekwonjohn36]

Thanks for the replies, everyone. Yes, I updated drivers before I even installed anything. I also gathered that video codecs should be updated so I installed MPC-HC and loaded MadVR codecs. I was reading up on how to edit an XML file for XBMC to use an external player but didn't get very far because the quality directly from MPC-HC still wasn't looking all that stellar so I haven't messed with the external player set-up yet. I think the next step would be to disable everything but the smooth playback in Catylist as Mr. Bluray suggests. In my googling I stumbled across another thread that mentioned disabling a few features that are meant to improve quality but actually hinder it and slow things down.

I thought that my AVR was set for everything to pass through on all devices but I guess I should look into that as well. HDMI sound is certainly preferable just because of the extended variety of decoding. However, the Xonar over optical surprisingly sounds quite excellent. I do have some high end speakers, though. But mostly, I need the pass through for 3D. This is another factor that could be causing issues. All of my HDMI devices pass through 2 units before it gets to the TV. First the receiver, then out to the 3D adapter and then to the TV. All is set for pass through but that's allot of cables and passing through. That said...it never diminished the quality from the WD media player. And this is why it's blowing my mind that this HTPC which has 50x the power doesn't look as good.

My other major concern is why the XBMC navigation is so clunky and laggy. I'm running a pretty fast quad processor, launching off an SSD and have 8GB premium 2133 Ram at my disposal. I'm quite certain processing power isn't the issue which is another point that makes me think the integrated graphics can't keep up. This is my first build in years so I'm not up to speed on current features and APUs are completely new to me. Win 8.1 is also new to me and taking some time to get up to speed with. Is there a way to allocate more of my RAM to the GPU?

Again, thanks for all your help and patience, everyone. I'm not used to being the noob. I stop paying attention to desktop tech for a handful of years and suddenly I feel like a dinosaur.

[lost89577]

A lot of TVs are 1080p/50hz not 60hz. Which can cause a lot of quality issues and make sure you have 24bit 44000hz in sound settings in windows (stupid windows 7 set at 16bit by default)

Have tried using xbmc+mysql setup, it made a big difference for me with my 40000+ library.

[bluray]

I do have some high end speakers, though.

If you have high end speakers and AVR, you definitely want to use nothing but bitstreaming through HDMI to get the best AQ...

My other major concern is why the XBMC navigation is so clunky and laggy.

Wrong audio configuration in XBMC can cause all kind of issues...

Is there a way to allocate more of my RAM to the GPU?

You can allocate RAM in bios. If you don't know for sure, you can check your mobo manual....

One thing you might need to check, make sure that Power Option is set to "Balanced" or you can try "Performance" in Windows...

[taekwonjohn36]

My TV runs at 120hz refresh rate. I think the AMD display driver maxes out at 60hz but I wouldn't think there would be that noticeable of drop in PQ/motion smoothness. I'll take a look at some settings in my bios when I get home and see if anything can be tweaked there. Everything is set to stock at the moment with no overclocking. I'm certain my power settings are currently at "balanced" but I'll try increasing that as well.

Here's another question that may be a dumb one. Would the physical HDMI cable matter for PQ? When I was swapping between direct to TV and through AVR, there were two different cables used. When I was trying the AVR, I borrowed the cable from the media player so I wouldn't have to pull my AVR out it's shelf and risk unplugging speaker wires which are only long enough to reach the back of the receiver. I've never been able to tell a difference in picture quality from any HDMI cable I've used in the past but I'm considering all possibilities at this point.

[bluray]

Would the physical HDMI cable matter for PQ?

As long as you see video on your TV and hear sound on your surround speakers, HDMI cable is fine....

Give some of the suggestions a try, and let us know how it turn out....

With the correct driver and configuration, there is no reason that you cannot navigate and playback fluently with your powerful APU....

[taekwonjohn36]

Okay. I disabled everything but "force smooth playback". I entered my bios and upped the shared memory from 1GB to 2GB for the graphics. That alone seems to have solved the issue because now suddenly everything looks excellent. I mean, really good. Better than bluray playback and the first movie I tested was only 720p. I haven't tried routing it through the AVR yet but I'm hoping that will work just fine as well. As for the remote, I'm attempting to configure the Droid app now. I need to share a few things on my wi-fi network so I'm going to have to dig through some docs for passwords but that should work for now.

Now onto another problem. What happened to the Executor and Advanced Launch add-ons? Not compatible with Frodo? Is there an alternative? I'm amazed that I'm not seeing any information on this in google searches. Nothing. I'm trying to use it to launch Hyperspin which I think is just a beautiful front end but if I can't launch it from Frodo, I can live with the ROM Collection Browser.

So to all of you whom steered me in the right direction with settings and saved me from buying another video card, I thank you very much. It's nice that you gents provided more useful information than I could find on Google. Guess I came to the right place.

[bluray]

Okay. I disabled everything but "force smooth playback". I entered my bios and upped the shared memory from 1GB to 2GB for the graphics. That alone seems to have solved the issue because now suddenly everything looks excellent. I mean, really good. Better than bluray playback and the first movie I tested was only 720p. I haven't tried routing it through the AVR yet but I'm hoping that will work just fine as well.

Great job! It should work through AVR too, but make sure to set AVR to pass through video.....