AVCHD - Should I keep what I got, or overhaul MB CPU, and Video?

[ran007]

Hello All,

I've recently subjected myself to the new AVCHD technology with Panasonic's SD1. I've poked all over the internet and found that KLite Codecs (free) seem to work along with Windows Media player, and any other video software. I've uploaded a 10 second MTS file and played it in WMP 10, and how gorgeous! The color, the depth, EVERYTHING is beautiful! The problem is, my P4 3.2 HT is at 100%, and the sound seems to slip. In other words, you can hear the sound completely, but it's not synced correctly. So I think it's my CPU... Not to mention if I recode it using TMPGXPress 4 down to H.264 720x480, it takes about 20 minutes - just for 10 seconds!

My proposed solution (and this is where I need your experience) is to either
1) Yank out my old Motherboard and put in: New MB, CPU (Core 2), 4GB Ram and Fast Video Card. May cost ~$1000.00 Ouch!
2) Possibly find an AGP 8x video card that will do the encoding/transcoding/decoding/recoding much more efficiently than and take load off of my poor CPU. And oh yeah, upgrade from 1GB to maybe 2 or 4GB RAM. Cost is unknown at this point.

Any thoughts?

[guns1inger]

I doubt you will find an AGP card tha does much if any of what you want. If you did, it would be a professional card, not a gamer card, and would cost you as much as option 1. Option 1 gives you much more freedom and is froward looking. Option 2 is an expensive "now" fix that is already obsolete.

[Soopafresh]

The E4400 Dual Core CPU with a lower end motherboard will support AGP video and DDR1 RAM, allowing you to use a lot of your old parts on a new system. I agree with guns1inger, however. Drop 700-900 dollars and get yourself a decent new PC. You don't need a high end video card for 2-D, and you really don't need more than 2GB of RAM at the moment. You'll justify the purchase immediately.

[edDV]

The ever elusive near future will have first hardware AVC display processors and then hardware encoders for PVR/DVR application. Current top end cards from ATI or Nvidia use CPU+GPU and still struggle. Nobody will want those cards when the real hardware AVC comes out.

[ran007]

Thanks guys, you all are really awesome. I've been admiring things you've contributed within the forum for the past few days, and it's been very helpful.

I've spec'd out a pretty good set up at Newegg with decent MB, CPU, RAM. I will probably go that way.

As far as AVCHD hardware on the horizon - I believe that will come along in due time, but for now, my main goal is to encode the originals to appleTV format, then save the originals until I get my hands on really good hardware comes out to handle AVCHD - much like how the appletv works. I love that thing.

Hopefully TMPGXPress 4 will update to handle native AVCHD files (video and audio) so that I don't have to hop and skip around for stable codecs.