Best way to watch HD content on 42" plasma

[Cloud]

My parents recently acquired a new 42" Sonic plasma (720p; 1080i) TV and I was wondering what the best way would be to watch HD content on it.

I have access to many different digital HD movies, varying from 720p to 1080p, and would like to watch it on my parents' TV.

I basically have a 500gb HDD with the content on at my place, what would I need to play this content on the TV and what would be the best quality?

My sister has a 2 year old Toshiba laptop, can that be used to play the content in HD? Would I need a VGA to HDMI cable? Can I just use VGA-> VGA cable? Would the laptop have to have a HD compatible video card?

I'm just staring to get familiar with the terminology, progressive and interlaced, full HD, HD ready and all that. Any advice you guys could give would be appreciated.

 

[mercurial]

I'd suggest you get and connect a multimedia player to stream those HD movies to your TV. The Popcorn Hour A-110 is a very good choice. Retails for about R3k locally.

 

[Keeper]

don't think the laptop's card will be able to....

use what you can use!

1) HDMi, else
2) VGA, else
3) Component

AFAIK you do get HDD Enclosures with Video Out! not sure about the HD Quality palyback though....

best would be to get a Media Centre that would handle 1080i or 720p, and use that. make sure it is able to use your 500GB hard drive. they cost in the range of R1500-R3000
but has it's own OS with a nice interface that shows you movie covers/etc, and you get a remote!

else, use another cheap PC, if you have spares laying around...

 

[Cloud]

Don't particularly wanna fork out R1-3k for a media player, this will be for the occasional family get together movie night thingy with my brother, sister and her husband.

So an old PC is probably the best bet here.

What would be the minimum spec for a PC to run this on?

 

[Keeper]

for HD?..hmm.... thats why i put it as last option....

i'd say the most important is CPU. for 720p a P4 3GHz would be fine, and for 1080p a Dual/Early Quadcore would be about fine.

use media player classic that comes with k-lite, don't go for VLC or windows' media player

 

[Cloud]

There is an old P4 2.6 Ghz with 2gb RAM and a Geforce 6800gt that I can use.

It has a DVI plug at the back. Would I be able to take the DVI to HDMI?

This would surely be okay for 720p content?

Please correct me if I am wrong.

 

[Keeper]

Yes, and Yes.

 

[Sapphiron]

Yes, and Yes.

Ditto

if the CPU is taking a bit too much strain on the 1080p material, go and buy a Sapphire 4350 for R400. It does a lot of the decoding taking the load off the CPU. I'm running 1080p material on a 3800+ AMD dual core at about 40% CPU load.

Was in the upper 90% with some dropped frames before the graphics card.

 

[Cloud]

I was hoping the 6800gt would make up for the weak CPU.

Do the new Nvidia drivers allow older cards to process HD content with hardware acceleration?

Gonna put Windows 7 on it as well for good measure ^_^

 

[Cloud]

Did some research and it seems the best solution for the 6800gt is to use component YUV cable out from s-video breakout.

Now to find the cable for it....

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=6632