2009-05-29, 08:45
I'm not sure if these are hardware or software questions, so apologies if I've posted in the wrong section.
I'm currently doing 3 things:
1. Deciding which htpc to buy/build.
2. Deciding which plasma to buy.
3. Ripping and converting blu-rays.
Which leads me to these questions:
1. Is the quality of the upscaling dependent on the hardware (gfx card?) or the software (xbmc)? The plasma I'm most interested apparently has average upscaling capabilities. If xbmc and/or the ION platform will do a good job of upscaling SD, then it won't matter.
2. From what I understand, there are only 2 sound cards that can currently pass through (bit-stream??) True-HD audio. If I keep only the True-HD audio in my mkv's, will xbmc/pc hardware downsample to DTS (or similar)? It takes 20+ hours to convert each blu-ray to mkv, and I don't want to have to do it all again when i get my xbmc htpc set up and find out the audio won't work.
I'm currently doing 3 things:
1. Deciding which htpc to buy/build.
2. Deciding which plasma to buy.
3. Ripping and converting blu-rays.
Which leads me to these questions:
1. Is the quality of the upscaling dependent on the hardware (gfx card?) or the software (xbmc)? The plasma I'm most interested apparently has average upscaling capabilities. If xbmc and/or the ION platform will do a good job of upscaling SD, then it won't matter.
2. From what I understand, there are only 2 sound cards that can currently pass through (bit-stream??) True-HD audio. If I keep only the True-HD audio in my mkv's, will xbmc/pc hardware downsample to DTS (or similar)? It takes 20+ hours to convert each blu-ray to mkv, and I don't want to have to do it all again when i get my xbmc htpc set up and find out the audio won't work.