My question for you all tonight is probably simple for most of you.. I am not familiar with the whole HD process, being that I only just recently purchased a monitor with the capability to display it.

I would like to watch media on the internet and movies using the HD setting. What exactly do I need to get started? I've got a 22" HP monitor, DVI cable, and an Nvidia 7600 GS 256 mb AGP. Anything else I need?

I see some things about decoders, are they necessary? If so which does the massassi community reccomend.

Note that I am asking you all because you can tell me things that other message boards may leave out in a google search, so just posting a link to a google search on the topic will not be of any help whatsoever.

i lol'd

Go ahead, I'll openly admit I don't know jack **** about this.

this

If you're just streaming "HD" content (which probably isn't actuall 720p or 1080p), then you're fine. Just stream it and make sure flash is using hardware acceleration.

If you're watching H.264 mkvs (which, coincidentally, I am about to do) of 720p or 1080p content, you will need the appropriate codecs. ffdshow is fine, though it is a bit slow for 1080p -- I experienced some audio/video desync and my HTPC isn't at all insuffiicient. In my case, I got MPC-HC (google it), which allowed me to use DVXA to offload the decoding onto my video card. I believe MPC-HC requires a GeForce 8-series or Radeon HD card for DVXA, though, so that option may not be open to you.

In the event that you find 1080p to be desynced or otherwise unplayable on your computer (there's no reason why you can't do 720p, so don't worry about that), you have the option of using CoreAVC (again, google it), which is a far more efficient decoder than ffdshow and allows for older computers and/or those with weaker video cards to play 1080p back smoothly with the CPU. Its latest iterations have also supported nVidia CUDA / hardware decoding, but again, I'm not sure if you can do that with your card anyway.

The drawback to CoreAVC is that it is a commercial codec, so if you don't have $15 (?) to purchase it, you'll have to figure out some other way to get it (I heard eyepatches and hook arms are useful for this purpose).

Ah ok, thanks Pom.

when I stream HD videos, they play beyond choppy. I'd say one frame per 5-7 seconds.

On my own knackered old PC, I find that streaming high-resolution video from sites like Youtube (i.e. anything that uses Flash) is very slow and stuttery. But if I use a firefox plugin to download the actual video file, and play it in Media Player Classic with the CoreAVC codec, it runs smoothly. In my experience Flash offers hideously slow performance as a movie player (and not just in comparison to CoreAVC).

By the way, what processor do you have? Much of the time your video card might not be accelerating the video decoding so your processor's speed is important.

Yeah I was reading about that when I googled about hulu fullscreen playback being choppy. Apparently its also the latest version of flash on some peoples computers, because flash 9 played them just fine.

I've got a 2100 mhz.

Pommy, thank you so much for telling me about MPC-HC. You are a God

It should be noted that DXVA acceleration is INCREDIBLY picky, and even when it does kick in, it oftentimes will absolutely DESTROY the video. There's quite a few shows I have where if DXVA activates, it becomes unwatchable.

I don't think the 7600 is DXVA, I think they started that on the next model up, but dually noted.

Having a decent amount of RAM can't hurt either I guess.

I don't have any issue with hulu on my PC and your specs sound a tad bit better. I only have issues trying to watch a 1080p downloaded movie in mkv, but I think it's my sound device that is causing the problem.

Yeah I really don't know what the hell the issue is with it, but its frustrating. I just did a fresh wipe/install of XP because of **** like this.