OK guys, so it's question time.
As I said in my last thread, I plan to build some Home Theater PCs. That being said, I've started to familiarize myself with current video card technology. First off, holy shit. I had no idea current cards had so much memory. 896MB? 1GB? 2GB? Holy fuck. If you're on a 32bit system, that's half your goddamn possible RAM.
Moving away from that, I found out that current ATI and Nvidia cards have built-in hardware acceleration for video decoding and encoding. Specifically, ATI has
Avivo HD and Nvidia has
PureVideo HD. Both look interesting, but I have some questions.
Since I'm looking to go with the HTPC idea, these two technologies look like they'll be very beneficial. In order to get the most out of my PCs, I'd imagine that I'll have to get both playback software and encoding software that support these technologies. Does anyone know which software packages support the built-in stuff on these cards?
Further, since I only plan to use these computers for video playback and encoding and NOT for playing modern games (yea, I'll probably play emulators and shit on the PCs, but that's it), I can't imagine I need the best of the best cards.
Can anyone recommend some reasonably priced graphics cards that support Avivo / Purevideo HD, as well as playback / encoding software that support them? Because really, being able to encode 1080p video 1.8x faster than realtime sounds fantastic. Oh, and obviously since these cards will be used for HTPCs, they'll need to have HDMI out, support HDCP, and it would be perferrable if they had an adapter for component / s-video / composite.
