I was thinking of using my laptop as a HTPC and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on how well a USB capture device would work to convert 480i content to 480p. In a post last year concerning this topic, someone suggested using this.

www.autumnwave.com

I was just wondering if anyone has had success using their laptop to convert 480i content to 480p for use in their projector and if they had any screenshots to show off.

Thanks!

Personally I would recommend that you not use a laptop as a media PC. Many laptops are underpowered and might not be able to handle conversion. If you can get it to work then great but a tower is better because you can use PCI capture cards which are overall faster and might give you better results. Go ahead and try the laptop if you want. If you buy the capture card from a store you can probably return it if it does not work.

P.S. Woot! My 100th post

Hmm.... I never thought about that. There are a couple of computer retailers not too far from me. I guess I can do some trial and error this weekend. Thanksx

I would look for a USB tuner with Hardware Encoding to keep the CPU down.
Using USB will raise CPU usage but not as much as a software encoder card.
Something like the Hauppauge! WinTV-PVR USB2 at Best Buy.
Of course you will need a usb2 interface on the laptop.

Another consideration with laptops is that most Hardrives in them are a little on the slow side.
Time shifting may give you dropped frames.

How bout using a Laptop just for viewing DVD? Plan to go outside this summer with the projector and a notebook would be much less combersum.

Any suggestions as to specs would be appreciated. Haven't bought the laptop yet.

Thanks all.

I use my laptop using the blu ray drive and it looks fantastic and I have yet to have any problems hadle dvd, divx or blu ray content.

I have a p3 550 laptop & it plays back xvid & mpeg2 recordings if I give mplayer or VLC a higher priority.
But, if I try to get fancy & pause the video it may crash the laptop.

Also, since this laptop has an ATI graphics card i've used geexbox.org on it & it's hardly struggled when playing media.
I think at least 800 mhz to 1 ghz would be needed on a laptop to be on the safe side.

It will also dpend on what kind of proceesor and ram, try the Acer Apire (home theatre series). I'm running the aspire 5920 and it runs blu rays smoothly and perfectly.

I use laptop outside once in awhile also ,, inspiron 6400 , works great except one time ,one friend closed the laptop because the lite was bugging her and shut down everything ,after that ,i put a towel over it as not to bother anyone.For outside use I always worried about bugs getting inot laptop.