Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater HTPC - Finally! (but have some issues)

OK...just got my very first PC built. Two days of trying to get my X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card to work, we finally ripped it out, and are running optical directly off the mb (Intel D975X BX2) into the receiver. Sounds GREAT.

With great anticipation, I put in my very first Blu-Ray disc ('Kingdom of Heaven'). The big red FBI warning was the biggest, sharpest, clearest I've ever seen! Wow. Then the "play", "setup", and various other menu buttons came up, but they were almost translucent with the same red FBI background. ??? Rather strange bug, but regardless, we charged forward, and clicked 'play'.

The 20th Century Fox logo comes up, again, big and bright - impressive, but I did notice obvious aliasing on the edge of the logo. Is that normal? I was hoping for virtually alias free images with 1080p Blu-Ray. Is that expecting too much? (<- legit question, I'm not being sarcastic)

Then the movie starts...again wow. The falling snow looked almost three dimensional. Very, very impressive! But (yeah, another 'but'), whenever the image pans or moves the image stutters. Not horribly, but it's noticable, and rather distracting. It's not ghosting, but rather seems to be almost skipping frames.

I spared few expenses when building this machine, so I'm wondering why I'm having trouble playing back Blu-Ray.

Here's my specs...any ideas what I can do to resolve these issues? I'm guessing it's something easy, that I just don't know about.

Thanks in advance.

motherboard: Intel D975X-BX2
cpu: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
RAM: 2GB Corsair XMS DDR2
HD: Western Digital 500GB
Video: EVGA Nvidia 8800 GTS
TV: Sony KDS-60A2000

DVI to HDMI cable connection between video card and TV
Playing back Blu-Ray with the PowerDVD 6.6 BD (came with the blu-ray drive). Is it worth the $99 to step up to version 7.0? Is there something better than PowerDVD?

Thanks!

What kind of processor? Check the Task Manager to see how loaded it is while you're playing the movie.

oops. edited.

What resolution and refresh rate settings are you using for your video card properties? Normally, you want to set the video resolution to match 1:1 of your projector or tv. For example, my projector is a native 720p projector, so I have my nvidia card set to 1280 x 720. Also, I can't if your using a projector or not, but most times you have to use 60hz for them.....good luck

I'm set at 1920x1080 60hz...matching the display.

Are you running some flavor of Vista? I have heard that 4GB of RAM is the 'sweet spot' for Vista. 2GB might not be enough...

Looks like a great system I can’t see how your hardware is holding you up. I’m looking to put together a system very similar to what you have and would like to see you work this out painlessly. From what I’ve read researching you might try the following if you already haven’t.

Try some other Blu-Ray disks to see if they all have this problem.
Check your CPU utilization when this is happening.
Make sure you have all the latest drivers for all your hardware.
Make sure hardware acceleration is on and set to full.

Are you using Winblows Vista or XP. Most recommendations I’m seeing say to stick with XP for now if you are making an HD HTPC. There seems to be many problems with Vista right now especially with drivers. I have read several posts in other forums where people said they had perfectly working MCE system that stutters when they upgraded to Vista.

Just a few thoughts. The more I look at it there seems to so many things that could cause this it’s disconcerting.

Nice. The Intel E6600 is in my opinion the best price/performance processor out there. It performs within a few % points of and even bests some recent "flagship" processors from both Intel and AMD and holds its own against current "flagship" procs. And for a song, relatively.

Your hardware should be enough to play BR without dropping frames. The E6600 is by itself is almost enough to do the job on its own. Your video card should easily offer enough acceleration to do the trick with no problems.

Anandtech BR Playback Ratings

Have you installed all the latest patches & drivers from Cyberlink & Nvidia?

I'll be trying the latest version of PowerDVD today. I also noticed there's a new driver for the video card available as well.

Is PureVideo something built in to the Nvidia cards, or is that something you need to purchase extra??