Hi,
I've been going through a series of small issues trying to get sky decoded using my sky card on my HTPC.
The system is an Intel Core2Duo @ 2.16Ghz, 2Gb of DDR2 ram, 500GB HDD, Radeon HD5450 and Windows 7 x86. Media client is Mediaportal and TV server.
The system was fine decoding SD channels without ACAMD but after getting sky working finally it appears that the cpu/gpu combo might simply be underpowered for my needs due to the overheads of HD and ACAMD. If I could do the sky card bit in hardware that would be great but I think that is a lot
Now, my needs are quite simple really. TV Server will be used to server tv around my house. At the moment, I'm simply talking about the lounge and the office PC. The office pc can decode the HD stream fine (I found that out last night) with minimal dropped frames HOWEVER the HTPC which is the streamer/client failed miserably on the same channel. Ultimately I want to emulate the sky box so that would be 4 tuners with the ability to record 3 HD channels at once and watch the 4th.
I could easily spec a new PC with an intel core i5/i7 etc but really at this stage I want the best upgrade I can for the cheapest price... For example, would simply adding an LGA775 quad core in place of the dual provide better performance for HD channels? Would I need to upgrade to a 6450 or perhaps more of a desktop card rather than HTPC style card?
Any help at this stage would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Chris