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All about HD, Media Center and x264

2007-06-03 11:36 PM | 0 comments

Since the wonderful Xbox 360 will likely never have support for Matroska video containers, commonly known as "x264" files, I ended up building myself a Media Center PC that hooks up to the Sony KF-42E200A over a DVI to HDMI cable. Relevant statistics:

• Core 2 Duo E4300, 1.8GHz per core


• Asus P5B Socket 775 motherboard


• 2GB DDR2-800 RAM


• Spare Seagate SATA 7200.7 120GB drive


• GeForce 7800 GT rescued from workstation


• Media Center 2005 remote

If I had to do it over again, here's what I'd change - which mostly would involve spending more money:

• Go with a P5B-E motherboard, which has a better chipset than the P5B vanilla


• Get at least an E6600 CPU for 1080p content (I might swap my desktop chip out)


• Consider going with a newer SATA drive, but not necessarily a Raptor (Raptors are loud)


• Instead of the 7800GT, go with a passively-cooled 8500GT or 8600GT, which offloads H.264 content decoding to the GPU. I've just bought an 8500GT that satisfies this condition, so we'll see what happens when I swap things in.


• Install a sound card that has native optical out ports - the motherboard has "HD Audio" and said optical out works, but I'm not sure if I'm getting all the quality I can.

HD is a beautiful thing to behold compared to standard definition. You definitely need at least a PC monitor or HDTV to appreciate it, but I watched Sin City today and it really benefits from the format. Facial features, zoomed shots, and high-quality action sequences are all a feast for the eyes. It won't improve the quality of a subpar film, but it gives a significantly incremental bump to the marginal action flicks. You can really appreciate the film for the cinematic effects and techniques; American Psycho has some great scenes in which background events are much more noticeable.

When 300 comes out on whatever format it's scheduled for, that'll be a sight to behold.

As for software, that's an interesting choice. I've found Vista's Media Center to be a worthy piece of software, even though it's only been installed for a few days. More on that in another post.