Posts Tagged ‘8400GS’

Re: Blu Ray

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Well it turns out I was not quite right – although upgrading the GPU to an 8400GS was a vast improvement, it is still not quite right. It seems that the CPU carries a bit of workload when paying Blu ray.The processor is running at between 60% and 100% during play back. And this is causing it to stutter slightly – enough to be annoying.

For the record the CPU is an Intel Pentium D 3066 MHz. So it seems that I DO need to upgrade my CPU

Which is a shame, becasue I really don’t want to. Although it does mean I can use the exisiting CPU in my yet-to-be-built home server….

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Posted in Blu Ray, Vista Media Centre | 1 Comment »

Blu Ray in VMC

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Now that the Blu Ray drive is installed, and I have gone out and bought a BR disc, I quickly discovered that my Nvidia 7 (7300GS) series graphics card was not able to handle blu ray playback. It worked but was very jittery – certainly unwatchable.

The blu ray drive comes with a piece of software that lets you know if your system is up to scratch – mine clearly wasn’t! The program said that my CPU and GPU were not able to handle playback. I suspected that the video card (GPU) ws not up to the job, but I would have thought my Celeron D processor would have been able to handle it.

So I took the cheap option and went out and bought an 8 series Nividia graphics card (8400GS), which I have just installed. And it works!! Amazing clarity on blu ray – even with my 768dpi screen (running at 600dpi).

So you need an 8 series or higher Nivida GPU and a Celeron D processor as a minimum to run Blu Ray. All we need now is for Windows Media Centre to play blu ray natively.

Hopefully this will be inplace for Windows 7….

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Posted in Blu Ray, Vista Media Centre | No Comments »