Media machine for living room?

[brightsid]

What's the chipset of the htpc?

[Snee]

I don't really do forums atm, just in to check my pms, but this caught my eye, and since I had a hand in recommending it, I did a quick search for stuff to halp you.

Random thread.
The guy in there had to enable hardware acceleration and do some other tweaks, now it's cool.

From what I understand by looking around it does some horribad software-only decoding from the get-go. And combined with a couple of cpu-hungry filters (normally it's not a problem but I guess the atom is speshul) like the ffd-show included in cccp, it gets bad.

EDit:

It does have an nvidia chip, see, that's the Ion. Which afaik supports the core avc you were talking about.

[brightsid]

It does have an nvidia chip, see, that's the Ion. Which afaik supports the core avc you were talking about.

Unless it's s330 with intel 945 chipset

[Artemis]

It does have an nvidia chip, see, that's the Ion. Which afaik supports the core avc you were talking about.

Unless it's s330 with intel 945 chipset

It helps to read the whole thread......cuts down on guessing that way, the motherboard skiz purchased is listed earlier in this thread - an ION based mini ITX board.

Skiz, I'm really NOT trying to dance on your grave after the purchase but one of the reasons for the F-E zotac board which I suggested is that it includes a PCI-e slot, although an extra cost, this does give you an upgrade path in case the 9400m IGP sucked ( it really shouldn't suck though, it is a 9xxx series NVidia chip with PureVideoHD using hardware decode) the 16 stream processors & 4 ROPS should be more than adequate.
Snee's suggestion that hardware decode is not enabled by default seems to be one of the only logical ones, if the chipset is not using the 9400M to decode but is instead relying on the Atom CPU then playback would indeed be awful, the Atom is a low power CPU.

[brightsid]

Unless it's s330 with intel 945 chipset

It helps to read the whole thread......cuts down on guessing that way, the motherboard skiz purchased is listed earlier in this thread - an ION based mini ITX board.

I've read the whole thread and suggested a ha setup for the ION nvidia chipset . Then he just quoted the intel/ati exception and yes after that I was just guessing .

[Skiz]

Thanks for the suggestions fellas. I'm gonna start with the link that Snee posted and then one-by-one start troubleshooting with the subsequent posts.

EDIT: I noticed that when playing 1080 content, the CPU is running at 100%. I dunno how that guy got his running at only 20%...

[Detale]

Damn dude I'm sorry your initial experience sucks. Lets not be hasty and sell it just yet. We'll figure this out toots sweet so don't panic

Have you downloaded and installed the latest bios and stuff from the website yet? Usually things like chipset drivers will help.

I have and am now reading many people who love it and have no issues playing 1080 with no problems at all. I mean in the first review I could find they said "Add to the integrated GeForce 9400m GPU a fully-native HDMI 1.3a connection, and the ION platform serves video to 1080p HDTV's better than most media players." seriously this is not a typical result as per a quick google search.

Could be the drivers at is would seem from this forum post. Try what they said and get back to us bud. Hope this fixes ya up man

EDIT to your EDIT: It shouldn't be running at 100% just from playing video man. Not even 1080p it's shouldn't be a system intensive thing playing 1080 Mkv's. I'll keep looking as well.

[lee551]

I use an Acer Revo for my HTPC, which also has an Atom processor (only 230 though) and Nvidia ION graphics. I have a Ubuntu/Win7 dual-boot set up, and I did have to enable hardware acceleration in Windows to get smooth HD playback.

This ION review shows the differences in CPU usage with hardware acceleration on (15%) and off (98%).

Hope you get it solved, HTPCs are the best.

[Detale]

Good article Lee, I do however disagree. Although HTPC's are in fact awesome the WDTV live is the best! I did just come across XBMC and I have never used it. I am going to scrap together an HTPC to check out XBMC for research purposes

[lee551]

Good article Lee, I do however disagree. Although HTPC's are in fact awesome the WDTV live is the best! I did just come across XBMC and I have never used it. I am going to scrap together an HTPC to check out XBMC for research purposes

Detale. I guess I meant "the best" in contrast to not having something to sling media. I fully respect your WDTV love. In fact, I'll admit I wasn't real familiar with them when I bought my Revo. I'd probably suggest them first now to any friends due to their ease of use and ridiculously low price ($120 say whaaat??).

I just like to make things hard for myself I guess. The freedom to scrap it all and start over with XBMC/Boxee/MythTV/etc is nice though.