divx box: x-card or all-in-wonder radeon 8500?

[justinconspicuous]

i'm lookin to make a divx/svcd/vcd/etc. computer for the living room. i was looking into the all-in-wonder radeon 8500, but then i came across the x-card. i was wondering which one i should get for my movie computer. also, i eventually wanted to add emulators to the computer so it'll be like a movie/console gaming computer for the living room. i heard the x-card couldn't do the gaming part though, so i was wondering if it was still worth getting it. and what about being able to see the windows interface on the tv... will the x-card allow that? any help would be really appreciated.

[droolian01]

Hi there.

Depends on what cpu you use (power wise). I'm not sure but i think that 1 ghz is the cutoff for reliable dvd playback. This is good for xvid too. Any less than that and i would opt for the x-card. But heck cpu's in the 1.4-1.6 ghz range are cheap, and with the radeon you could playback anything. The xcard will not playback old divx3.11 (sbc stuff) and may have probs with some mpeg4 implementations. Also remember that Sigma did try and rip off the xvid code - so you really shouldn't support them.

[alexnoe]

I've tried (long time ago) a PII/350 for DVD replay, and it was not really smoth, but overclocking to PII/392 fixed it.

Graphic Card was a Matrox Marvel G200-TV.

[sarahjh69]

anything faster than a
p3 500
will do DVD and DiVX perfectly

make sure you get a real ATI card
not a 'powered by' if you want tv out

contrast and brightness are not as
good on the 'powered by ati' cards
(but they are still better than
nvidia tv out)

[theReal]

Get an ATI card - you can use the TV as the only monitor with Radeon cards. If you connect via S-Video cable and if you have a good tv set, you won't need any monitor at all.

If you want the box to be a gaming station anyways, I guess your cpu will be more than strong enough to play all divx on a Radeon card. This way you won't have any compatibility issues with the Sigma hardware decoder.