home theater pc

Ok I have a pc now, Asus m2n32-sli mb, amd athalon xp2 dual core processor, a lite-on br reader, a cd burner,and a good graphics card (cant remember but i bought it cause it said it would do hd).  Hear is my question, is the motherboard and processer right for a home theater pc?  im not really a fan of the the mb anymore. i loved it for a while but for some reason i keep getting stupid error messages but that is besides the point and i would rather just start over with something new. I wont be watching anything except blu ray disks, my movies on my wonderfull 6 tb unraid servers which is just AWSOME and maybe some stuff on the internet, netflix, etc. I wont be capturing any movies or tv or anything but i will be ripping dvds to put on my unraid.  So all in all i will be using it as a hyped up dvd player. Also i will more than likely be using cinamars dvd hard drive package so if you guys have any suggestions that would be appreciated.

You should visit the AVS Forum

Video card plays a big role, also if you wanted to watch BR movies and wanted the full effect you would need a motherboard or sound card that would be able to support hdmi since that is the only thing that has enough bandwidth to carry high def codecs (True HD and DTS HD)

Also from everything that I have read most people recommend a core 2, then again it depends if the video card you have can help decode the BR movies. If not, I'm not sure that CPU could be enough. The AVS forum is an awesome place to get more info as they have a forum area dedicated to home theater computers. If you have the full specs of your computer post em' up here and I can give you some more details.

Hope this helps

As mentioned, you need to check if the graphics card supports hardware acceleration of the bluray codecs, namely VC1, AVC and MPG-2.  I used a really old PC fitted with a new ATI AGP card that supported hardware acceleration of these codecs and could watch bluray movies in Powerdvd with very low cpu useage.

Also if the graphics card isn't HDCP compatible you will need extra software to strip the protection from the bluray before you can watch it.. (I'm talking about bluray disks you bought and own here.. nothing illegal!)

In the end I built a new HTPC, because not all types of video can be hardware accelerated currently.. namely MKV's.  So for that you need a meaty processor.

Cant you simply try playing a bluray movie on the PC as you have it and see if it works?

Ok thank you. i just bought an AMD Phenom 9950 BLACK EDITION 2.6GHz Socket AM2+ 140W Quad-Core Processor Model HD995ZFAGHBOX and a GIGABYTE GA-MA78GPM-DS2H AM2+/AM2 AMD 780G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard.  All the reviews said its 1080p right off the bat. no fussing around or anything. this should do just fine. Thanks again for the advice.