2009-03-12, 03:59
fekker Wrote:The other side of the windows coin, an e5200 (2.5ghz, $72 cpu) will play back 1080p, even the crazy killa sample. Sometimes ya just have to through a bit of hardware under things with windows. Combine that with a decent micro-atx board ($52 gigabyte board with intel g31) and it's a nice quiet htpc that plays everything, even in windows.
Not having hardware decoding isn't the end of the windows version. And for most Hard core gamers that are using the pc for it, also hooked to hd displays, they have much faster cpu's.
If i had any clue how to do directx anything (which I don't) I would gladly write something, but I'm just not that good. At the same time, if someone can write it, i'll gladly test it.
You can play many 1080p videos at 2.53 GHz, but not all. I've remuxed a number of Blu-Rays and found that I needed to overclock well past 3GHz to get some of the H264 streams to play. Even at 3.5GHz, I drop tons of frames in 1080i 30fps Blu-Ray streams, though everything else plays fine. VC1 remuxes are a bit less demanding, and MPEG2 is trivial.