Old PC, HD content?

[superAL1394]

I've got an old P4 system, 2.0ghz, 512mb rdram, and an ATI Radeon 9600. I was thinking with a GPU upgrade, it could play HD content acquired through alternate channels *cough*, as well as HD podcasts, encoded h.264. Anyone have any experience with this? Is it worth my money to drop in a newer, AGP based gfx card? Does boxee even do gpu decoding?

Edit: Probably gonna do it under Ubuntu 8.10

[jdarnold]

AFAIK, Boxee doesn't use hardware decoding. I would think 2.0 ghz is plenty fast enough for boxee, although AGP is a pretty old interface for a graphics card these days. You might have a hard time finding a new card for it. One nice thing about a new card - you can get it with either a DVI or even an HDMI connector and use that for good playback.

[botvinik]

My experience with the above CPU with h.264 was that there was at best a very annoying slight lag of the video behind the audio but it was normally worse than that. I tried running Xubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 as the base system of the install to cut out any unneccesary overhead but h.264 was just too much. You might have better luck with a P4. I was using a nvidia 5300 based card and tried both 1980x720 resolution and 1680x1050 (on a monitor).

For HD (especially 1080p and possibly DVD upconverting) my reading has been pointing me to an epiphany that dual core may be necessary.