Video Asylum

Posted by muser (R) on November 17, 2009 at 15:51:15

I am thinking of creating a simple home theater PC for my son's videos, e.g. Thomas the Tank Engine, Barny, etc. with his DVD videos on an older computer hooked up to my ancient CRT. I'm not very concerned about video resolution, though I want the video to flow as smoothly as it would from the DVD player.

I like the idea but don't know whether the family will cotton to it, so I don't want to spend too much on it, yet.

My hardware is as follows:
Dell (~2003)
Pentium 4
512MB Ram
XP Pro
My video card will not "talk" to my TV.
I have a PCI slot open, the machine does not have PCI Express slots.
500MB hard drive.
1988 Toshiba CRT.

The PC will not be doing double duty, it will be just for the "kiddie videos." Is that machine a reasonable foundation for my plan?

I know I will need to buy a video card that will connect with the CRT, so that's something that definitely needs upgrading. If the rest of the system is sufficient to replay DVDs ripped to a harddrive on my TV, I'll buy the video card. If not, then I've got to decide whether to take the leap to a more powerful machine, which is otherwise unnecessary at this point. Said slightly differently, can I get away with a $90 video card, instead of upgrading to a used but newer Mac Mini (or PC equivalent).

If you're of the opinion that the machine is sufficiently powerful, what minimum parameters should I have for a video card? 32MB, 128MB? Cheaper would be better because I don't know how this will work out and don't want to buy Mag wheels for an Edsel, if you get my meaning; I could just take the leap and buy a Mac Mini.

FWIW, we're mostly a two channel audio family. We haven't watched tv in 6 years, though we do occasionally watch videos (once or twice a month we watch something besides kiddie videos), so this is a decidedly low priority interest.

In advance, thanks for your thoughts.

Larry