Getting my current Sage Box to do HD

[cslatt]

So I'm getting a free HDTV (I'm lucky, I know). This of course leads me to wonder what I would need to do to get my current Sage box to record and playback HD content. I've been following things on the recording side (OTA vs QAM, etc) and I'm pretty sure my HD Locals are pushed in the clear from my cable provider so I'd probably go with the HD Homerun, but things are less clear to me on the decoding/playback side of things.

My current box is both server and client. It is an Athlon XP 1700+ with 1GB of DDR SDRAM and has an AGP Radeon 9800 Pro with both DVI & VGA connectors.

I'm guessing based on some searching that I've done that my box won't render HD smoothly. Is that the case? Any suggestions on the cheapest way to get it up to that level of performance? If it costs too much I'll probably just wait for the HD extender, but without a firm release date on that I'd like to at least explore my options.

[lobosrul]

Originally Posted by cslatt

Any suggestions on the cheapest way to get it up to that level of performance?

Well that vid card just wont do it. I would suggest an NVIDIA 6800 AGP (NOT a GT), with silent cooling. You can get them cheap on EBAY. You will definantly need the nvidia purevideo decoder. That upgrade right there just might be enough to playback HD MPEG2 TS smoothly (all OTA and i assume QAM HD is MPEG2 TS). It certainly wont do h.264 HD playback and im doubtful it would playback high def divx/xvid. So encoding is probably out of the question (encoding would take forever with that cpu anyways).

Oh, and realize HD takes about 6-8 GB an hour of disk space.

[flavius]

I think, you'd be a good candidate for the HD extender when it comes out (Q2). You would need a much better box to record and play HD at the same time whereas the HD extender will probably cost less than half of any new suitable rig, and you will be able to use your existing machine as the server.

[olyar15]

That card will work fine with HD in overlay. If you want to use VMR, then you need to upgrade.

[IVB]

I used to have a 9800Pro in one of my HTPC clients and had no issues rendering HD. I did have an AMD3200 in it, but i'm not smart enough to know whether that was a factor or not.