They already have decent video cards installed. These are full-fledged PC's than play all my music files bit-perfect and output them digitally to my Krell and Pioneer for decoding. The video playback (all but BD) play superbly. Actually there is not 1 thing wrong with these HTPC's, despite their age and old CPU, that have me thinking why so many people feel they need such high power spec'd PC's for HTPC playback (unless, of course, you are looking for BD playback). These HTPC's are strictly media machines, there is no web surfing, game playing, or anything happening other than MC's capabilities. In fact these HTPC's start up on MC automatically in Theater View.
The video cards in these HTPC's are NVIDIA cards (PCI and AGP based), and each HTPC in question is a Pentium 4 2.8 gHz, and has 4 gigs RAM running XP on one and Win 7 on the other. Everything runs butter smooth and perfect. Even blu-ray playback surprised me that it actually plays on these machines with great color and full audio. It just happens to play slow - like in slow motion. It doesn't stutter, or rebuffer, it just runs as if I hit the slow motion button - approx 1/2 times slower than normal speed. Maybe this *is* a setting on the PC's in question or MC? I don't see any settings in MC's DSP config panel that allows user control over video properties. I understand that for the most part MC handles the video without user intervention perfectly well, but in this particular situation maybe I can tweak it on my end?
Ideas?
Jimmy