Background light for the monitor?

Wordpad · 29 days

Biased lighting actually serves a purpose in better perceived color reproduction. What's in the video doesn't measurably improve anything unless you think it's "cool". Don't down vote the guy for knowing a thing or two....

Recoil42 · 1 month

either bring down the levels at the top end in After Effects, or just put a transparent solid over the whole thing to mute it a bit, the latter should also make it less busy and the text easier to read... just my 2 cents

JamesDK · 1 month

HDMI has always carried audio and video. You don't need any special cable as alluded to NY the other poster.

The processing it takes to do the decoding onboard isn't a factor, as it would only need to do it for be rips with HD multi-channel audio. If you aren't playing blu-rays, then you don't need to worry about it. The 560ti 448 will do regular dts and Dolby digital.

I have the 560ti 448 and run my audio as PCM and have no problems, there is no sound difference either, it's just that some people like to see the "trueHD" or "dts-HD" logos light up on their receiver. The only real sonic difference is that you can't add post processing via your receiver. Also, if your receiver can't decode the newer HD audio formats then PCM is the only way to go and none of this matters.... hope that clears some things up...

JamesDK · 1 month

Just a warning on the 560ti 448, since it uses the same chip as the 570 and 580, it will not bit-stream high def audio formats (TrueHD, DTS-MA, etc.), so you will have to decode HD audio on your machine and send it out as PCM. Just a heads up...

1_point_21_gigawatts · 1 month

Not to mention the ridiculous amount of people that are underage that somehow end up at Tai's...

Tezcatl666 · 1 month

as someone who is a mental ray guy, try turning up the glossy samples on materials that are grainy, or adversely, turn up the samples of the sky portal or photometric light...

c53x12 · 1 month

Yah, I have tuner cards, so I avoid it by just not using sleep mode. My rig doesn't draw that much power when idle anyways...

c53x12 · 2 months

If you can, don't use sleep mode, most modern systems will clock down when not in use anyway. Sleep mode can be problematic with a dedicated HTPC.

-In terms of video quality, you may want to do some tweaking of the gpu. Make sure you are passing the correct colorspace (PC's use 0-255, while most video is 16-235). I run an HTPC and the video quality for live tv is a little better than what I had with a Motorola Set-top, and blu-Rays look better to me than what my ps3 outputs, but I have tweaked the settings accordingly and used test patterns and what-not to get it just right.

macinmypocket · 2 months

do whatever you can to squeeze an i7 in there then, it has about twice the power of an i5 when it comes to CPU rendering...

macinmypocket · 2 months

Cpu is the classic form of rendering, where each CPU core is a bucket and each bucket works on a section of the image (or something similar depending on the rendering engine.)

GPU rendering is newer and renders almost completely on the graphics card. It is much faster than CPU rendering but it's still in it's infancy, hence, problems that may not arise with cpu rendering...

Depending on what he is using, the rig may look completely different...

macinmypocket · 2 months

What kind of rendering will he primarily be doing? GPU or CPU?

macinmypocket · 2 months

For 3ds Max, SLI will show no improvement, and in fact, can hurt viewport performance. The i7 is a must though for Max work, as it double the amount of rendering "Buckets" available...

Solkre · 2 months

-Arcsoft or PowerDVD for playing optical media

-Make MKV for DVD-BR rips

-You can use codec packs in addition to WMC or something like MPC-HC for playback of media files that are downloaded, assuming they are DRM free...

Eleftheria12 · 2 months

Check out the grass-o-matic plug in

CaptainPain · 2 months

Who is the company if you don't mind my asking?

adubftw · 2 months

Rom Collection Browser if you use XBMC, Game Browser if you use Media Browser, and I prefer GameEx for a standalone, it's also one of the easier to set up once you get the hang of how it works...

caughtus · 2 months

Windows XP won't know how to handle an SSD. I don't know what to tell you though other than get a new computer. If you could convince your boss to spend $250 you could get a new small form factor computer that will run circles around this one.

I just made a retro-gaming box for a friend using an old HP I inherited from work. In the end, I would have probably spent the same amount of money buying a new computer even for something as simple as that...

vitalpc · 2 months

if he is using Max and Maya, he would want to go with the 580 over a 7970. Go for the 3GB model if you can. Doing iRay renderings, or just really heavy viewports, you will need all the vram you can get.

A lot of this also depends on whether or not he is doing CPU or GPU rendering. If he is doing a lot of cpu rendering, he might want to spend the money on a server board with dual processors.

DecentOdds · 2 months

You could get a 570 at that price range easily.

PondoSinatra · 3 months

are you trying to pass Dolby Digital and DTS, or TrueHD/DTS MA? Optical will only handle the first two. You never specified...

PondoSinatra · 3 months

try setting your windows audio to 2 channel stereo on the spdif output.

It's counter-intuitive, but in order for your receiver to decode the 5.1 stream, it has to be bit-streamed by XBMC. If you have windows set-up to do 5.1, then it will do the decoding and output the sound as PCM. If it is set as 2-channel, then it will bit-stream the 5.1 from XBMC as long as your XBMC settings are correctly set to bit-stream DTS and DOlby Digital...

PondoSinatra · 3 months

Are you setting the right output in the sound control panel? Assuming you are using windows, you have to make sure the sound is being output through SPDIF, otherwise it may be defaulting to output via HDMI or something else....

3scoops · 3 months

I don't have Fios, but from what I hear Fios is the easiest service to set up a Cablecard with.

Setting it up in W7 is easy as pie. If you want to take it a little farther like I have, you can omit all the stations you don't receive and order them how you'd like. I have all my channels in alphabetical order, statiuons I don't have omitted from the list and little logos for all the stations, which took me about 2-3 hours...

loogielv · 3 months

Yah, I was on my phone so it was harder to check back and see that he had mentioned that.

The point still remains though, you could buy a new mobo, cpu and GPU for less than $200, and that $200 spent on a vga/hdmi converter isn't well spent since it will not improve the picture quality at all...

loogielv · 3 months

It won't help. There are low profile cards that can be had for $30, the ati 5450 comes to mind. You'll end up spending more money on workarounds if your tech is that old. It's easier to just upgrade the PC components. That being said, I'm sure there is someway to put a low profile pci-e card in there (provided you have a pci-e slot, if you don't have onboard graphics you should have at least one slot)

As for judge Judy/peoples court, no need to buy a channel master dvr. Just buy a USB tuner stick and use the dvr functionality built into Windows 7 media center, it's the best dvr out there....

nadafinga

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