HD Movies

[beanbag]

It's been done before I'm sure, but WOW

I've had a 720p Sharp TV now for the last 7 months but i've only ever really watched the planet earth series in HD mainly because I was running out of HDD space, however now I've got 1TB of storage in the house and I've been madly getting my hands on Xvid and DivX HD movies and all I can say is WOW!

So far I've watched:

Mission Impossible 3
Terminator 2
Apollo 13
Planet Earth
Serenity
300

The detail is stunning and after comparing T2 DVD which I have the HD version, it's fantastic! You can really immerse yourself into movies and it makes for a great experience along with my Media Center PC. I'm dead chuffed!



Now I'm curious as to how good 1080p is, but I'm definitely pleased with my 720p set.

[beanbag]

SS HSV said:

A guy at work has membership with ilovefilm and rents a few films every week. Then using AnyDVDHD you can 'borrow them' straight to your hard disk

I must say that the Blu Ray discs I own are all about 30gig plus so a terrabyte drive only holds about 30-35 films. I have a massive 24 hard disk server which is currently mostly unpopulated but could be 24TB if I were stupid enough to invest in suitable drives

Yup, but you can compress to Xvid or DivX and get those files down to a 6GB size without much of a bother and without too much loss of quality. (Of course there is loss but you have to look at it in the same way it is from DVD to DivX).

[beanbag]

Mr_Yogi said:

qube_TA said:

Daft question as although I've 3 HD sets I've yet to try any HD content other than games.

Using a PC, what sort of power do you need to run HD content properly, my humble Athlon XP is far too slow, looks like a slideshow!

About a 2.4GHz Core2Duo or Athlon 6000+, couple of GBs of DDR2 RAM and a video card with HD video processing cababilites such as those based on the AMD(ATI) 2600XT or nVidia 8600GT/ GTX

Not true whatsoever. I run my HD content on a humble Athlon XP 3200+ with a GF 5200 and 1GB RAM. It's not BluRay or HDDVD, but it's 1280x720 content in both Xvid HD, DivX HD, QuickTime HD, and HDWMV.

I have also run an Xbox HDDVD belonging to my friend on my Athlon 64 4000+ main system with the ATI X1950 Pro graphics card and had a quick glimpse of King Kong in true HD on the my computer.

On both occasions, it was silky smooth with no loss in frame rate.

Edited by beanbag on Wednesday 5th December 13:00

[beanbag]

allgonepetetong said:

beanbag said:

It's been done before I'm sure, but WOW

I've had a 720p Sharp TV now for the last 7 months but i've only ever really watched the planet earth series in HD mainly because I was running out of HDD space, however now I've got 1TB of storage in the house and I've been madly getting my hands on Xvid and DivX HD movies and all I can say is WOW!

Where are you getting these movies from? I would like some also

I'm not going to say on here for obvious reasons but just I use legal tool called Bittorrent. I recommend uTorrent as a client. Everything you need is built into the tool. (That's the legal bit).

The rest is up to you....

Oh, and make sure you have no bandwidth restrictions and plenty of hard disk space. HD movies reach to 6-10GB.

[beanbag]

Mr_Yogi said:

beanbag said:

Mr_Yogi said:

qube_TA said:

Daft question as although I've 3 HD sets I've yet to try any HD content other than games.

Using a PC, what sort of power do you need to run HD content properly, my humble Athlon XP is far too slow, looks like a slideshow!

About a 2.4GHz Core2Duo or Athlon 6000+, couple of GBs of DDR2 RAM and a video card with HD video processing cababilites such as those based on the AMD(ATI) 2600XT or nVidia 8600GT/ GTX

Not true whatsoever. I run my HD content on a humble Athlon XP 3200+ with a GF 5200 and 1GB RAM. It's not BluRay or HDDVD, but it's 1280x720 content in both Xvid HD, DivX HD, QuickTime HD, and HDWMV.

I have also run an Xbox HDDVD belonging to my friend on my Athlon 64 4000+ main system with the ATI X1950 Pro graphics card and had a quick glimpse of King Kong in true HD on the my computer.

On both occasions, it was silky smooth with no loss in frame rate.

Edited by beanbag on Wednesday 5th December 13:00

I was refering to HD-DVD and Blu-ray content which is 1080p (1920x1080), has much higher bit-rates and is usually encoded with AVC or VC1 which is a lot more demanding to decode.

Sure....I know my XP 3200+ can't handle it, but my Athlon 64 4000+ certainly can....Like I said, I played King Kong on my PC in HD through an Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive

[beanbag]

Mr_Yogi said:

That is interesting as I'm sure I read somewhere (Firingsquad maybe?) that even the Core2Duo E6600 (2.4GHz) struggled with some VC1 encoded disks without a video card cabable of taking some of the load.

Must have been early software players/ codecs, it was about a year ago. Good to hear it's got better

Edited by Mr_Yogi on Thursday 6th December 15:27

I've got quite a potent GPU (X1950 Pro), and it has HD hardware decoding, so perhaps that helps a lot....

[beanbag]

allgonepetetong said:

beanbag said:

allgonepetetong said:

beanbag said:

It's been done before I'm sure, but WOW

I've had a 720p Sharp TV now for the last 7 months but i've only ever really watched the planet earth series in HD mainly because I was running out of HDD space, however now I've got 1TB of storage in the house and I've been madly getting my hands on Xvid and DivX HD movies and all I can say is WOW!

Where are you getting these movies from? I would like some also

I'm not going to say on here for obvious reasons but just I use legal tool called Bittorrent. I recommend uTorrent as a client. Everything you need is built into the tool. (That's the legal bit).

The rest is up to you....

Oh, and make sure you have no bandwidth restrictions and plenty of hard disk space. HD movies reach to 6-10GB.

My God, how long does that take to download - around a week?

About one 3-4 hours on a good day for a 9GB movie.....16Mb/s connection.....usually downloads at about 1.5MB/s. On a perfect day you can get a movie in about 2 hours but that's very rare. Only happened once!!!