Recommend a Hassle-Free Video Card and Codec for HD OTA and h.264

[sage_doc]

Ok, after many hours of playing around with different codecs, I cannot get smooth, flawless 1080i full-screen playback of OTA ATSC material on my 780g board. I get tearing of the screen or stutters (Cyberlink, Intervideo, Arcsoft, Core, etc.) H.264 material is way too jerky with any codec at high resolution.

My system:
Asus M3A78-EM motherboard (AMD 780g)
AMD X2 5000+
4 gigs of ram
2 Western Digital Green 500gb drives
60" Sharp Aquos LCD (1080p)
Windows XP SP3
Latest Sage

So, I think I have more than enough CPU power... I'm blaming the video card. In an ideal situation I'd just get the HD Extender, but I want a DVD player.

** So, what video card would you recommend that will play flawless, smooth 1080i and Blu-Ray. I want something where I plug it in and have it just work.

Playing around with all these codecs is killing the HTPC experience

Thanks!

[HelenWeathers]

OK, I'll take a stab at this. I run the nVidia 9600 GT 512MB on both my SageTV Clients under Vista SP1 on one and XP SP3 on the other. I have nVidia codecs on the XP machine and whatever comes with Vista on the Vista machine. Those do the older mpeg files playback. I also have ArcSoft Total media Theater on the XP machine (for Blu-ray) but the codecs that are installed with it are only used by TMT as far as I know. Both Sage Clients are set to overlay rather than VMR9 and I use the default Sage settings for codecs. I have three OTA ATSC tuners and two HD PVRs set to highest bit rate recording and get great playback of recordings from both on both clients with one exception: On my Vista machine when a news station has a crawl along the bottom there is an ever so slight hesitation in the crawl movement. Not distracting but present. Can't see any hesitation in the regular video portion though.

Hope this helps

EDIT: here's a link - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814121244

[stanger89]

The 780G is plenty for H.264, if it was encoded correctly. If you didn't encode the H.264 correctly (ie use a DXVA/PS3/Xbox 360 profile) then it all falls to the CPU and no video card will help you.