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Athlon 3500+. Originally put a GeForce 7100GS in it, but when I read that 8500 & 8600 had hardware H264 decoder built in, I thought I'd try.
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Ouch, I thought you were using an old old Athlon, not one of the 64bit chips :-\ If your choice is a faster chip or WinMCE I'd point out a top line S939 chip is cheaper than WinMCE :0) Although its impossible to know if you'd still have problems until you try it [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] (if the player/library is multithreaded you shouldn't have a problem, dunno if thats the case)
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Ok, I've thrown in an extra HDD to try out MCE (which I already had a copy of). I was pleased to discover Media Portal (
http://www.team-mediaportal.com/) an open-source windows-based HTPC solution. It is basically like MythTV for windows. It installed incredibly easy, and so far it looks like it should meet my needs. Best of all, a 9GB H.264 file played without a stutter or hiccup at all. I'm gonna do a little more testing but I think I'm probably going to stick with windows. My IR module isn't easily supported by LIRC, and the VFD is even harder to get working.
After installing Media Portal it automatically set up the remote control profile so keys were all mapped to appropriate buttons, and I can set the VFD to do whatever I want (there is an active thread on the MP forum from people trying to get the VFD to output MP information, so it should work pretty soon).
Unless I see something major that I hate about MP, I'm going to stick with it over MythTV for now.