What do i need to watch Hd-xvid and other hd movies.

[Spope]

What kind of graphic card do i need to watch hd-xvids and other hd material on my hd flatscreen tv. Is it necessary that the card has HDCP support? Im buying a new computer and i dont know wich graphics card to choose.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

no need for HDCP on Xvids, and right now anything above a GF7 or X1K mid-range will play them about the same.

 

[jaguarskx]

Yeah, for high resolution DivX or XviD files you do not need anything really special.

However, if you want to watch Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, then you're talking about some serious hardware. I suggest you read the following article from Anandtech about HD Video playback:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2886

Basically, the following are recommended:

1. C2D E6600 or Athlon X2 equivalent.
2. An nVidia video card since they are better at offloading decoding better than ATI cards.

The article was written last year so who knows how well the X2900 will be able to offload decoding from the CPU.

Looks like my next HTPC will be as powerful as my primary PC.

 

[kreacher]

The 8600 series from nVidia and 2600 from AMD both support hardware decoding for some video codecs so that should help. I could watch the Harry Potter HD (720p) Quicktime trailer without any hiccups on my Core 2 Duo 6420 + 8800GTS with the CPU utilization in the 8-12% range. I've never tried any HD XVid or Blu-Ray etc. so can't comment about those.