HD Processing With PC Hardware

[john_kelly]

Folks,
I'm looking into moving into the HD World with regards to HTPC's.

Background to what i'm doing:
My Plan is to create a media server with tons of space and put all my dvd's and music on it. And then use barebone style systems around the house to stream the Content. I will be using XBMC when its successfully ported to Linux as the operating system.

Main Question:
When looking at stand alone Blueray and HD Dvd Players i'm noticing alot of extras for instance Devon have a DVD Player with advanced processing harware and sony have 24p for Movies. All geared around to out due one another\Increase the Quality. My Question is by going down the HTPC Route can any of these extras be be achieved with software ie: upscaling, 24p?? As i'd be relying on Graphics cards from nvidia\ati to output the picture, these cards are really only made for gaming. From your experience would the htpc route pay off or would using single player be a better way to go to get increased performance/all the extras that these players are offering?

Thanks

[choddo2006]

All software based media players do upscaling. I don't see why 24Hz would be a problem either as long as the graphics card & driver supported it. nVidia in particular seem to cater for HTPC needs from what I've read. Don't know if their linux drivers are more limited.

You might want to look at something like the Netgear media player though, as nice as XBMC is, it would probably be much less hassle (but some firmware issue at the moment)

And on a PC, you'd need a decent CPU to handle HD. Core2 Duo probably.