MEDIA PLAYERS

The minimum specification of your system will depend upon what you want to do. I started with a system based on an Athlon 800 but soon found that this has its limits especially when playing DivX encoded films (more on this later or see history section).

One key area for concern is noise generation, obviously in the living room you don't want a device that sounds as if it was taking off.

The system components that I will list take into account of price, performance and noise generation, and are ones that I have used.

 

Graphics Card

With video or svideo out. I use a simple GF5200fx that has no cooling fan. I use the svideo out to connect to my AV amp and using Nvidea media center software can alter the screen size so it fully fills the TV screen, adjust colours and brightness and reduce the flicker.

The graphics card will also accelerate DVD playback (MPEG2 file format) but not any other such as DivX (MPEG4) or MPEG2-TS- the free view broadcast

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