You can install transcoder for your PC to enocde it on the spot for you.  You can run it from widows media center too.  That's what I use to do.  But it takes a lot of processor power.  You could try SUPER video encoder and manually change all of your file types, but then you would use the quality of .avi. 

haha.  My room mate has the modded xbox and its sweet.  The only problem, no HD movies.  Other than that, we watch ripped commercial free tv shows and movies daily.  Its nice.

about the quad core SLI, it was still only running through two PCI-E slots where this would be three, so this might be better?

Ahh, that's true, I hadn't thought about that.  Of course, most multi-PCIe boards don't support PCIe x16 on all three ports.  The older stuff is mostly 1 x16 and 2 x8's, or worse yet, 1 x16 and two x4's.  The Intel X38 chipset I plan on buying supports full blown PCIe 1.0 x16 on all three slots, but even with that you only get PCIe 2.0 x16 on one slot.

Of course, the Intel chipset doesn't support nVidia's SLI anyway due to nVidia not offering the license, so it's really a moot point.

-b0b
(...and who the heck wants Crossfire, anyway?)

So I just thought I would point out that there is NO video overlay for the 8000 series Nvidia cards. Which sucks bad.

For those of you that dont know what that is, you can open a video player on one montor, and have that video fullscreened on another monitor or tv. this was great cause I could minimize the vid and keep working while it outputted to the tv. Especially handy when working in premiere... any video would just be automatically fullscreened over.

So now to watch stuff on the tv I have to have it set up as a video clone of the current monitor and fullscreen it... or full screen it on the tv but still not really be able to use my machine.

With all of the outputs of my card, why the balls would Nvidia take out functionality for something thats been there for as long as I can remember.  Especially since people are outputting to their HDtvs from their computer more!!

Annoying. I'm putting in my old card in addition to the new one just so I can do the video overlay.

Come on, Briney, we know you're making the big bucks now.  Why don't you buy a Quadro?

-b0b
(...wants one.)

XP SP3 has been pushed back almost as many times as today's other topic, Duke Nukem Forever.

Microsoft has been really quiet about SP3, preferring to push Vista instead (which makes sense from a business perspective).  The only thing they've official said was that it would include some changes to Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Media Player 11.  Most likely, those two programs will be a required component of SP3.

Considering that XP has officially been replaced by Vista, I'm guessing SP3 will be more of a "patch rollup" than the massive service packs we're used to seeing for XP that bring new functionality.  It'll probably be a collection of all of the patches released thus far, along with IE7, WMP11, and the Windows Live application suite.

When it comes to Vista SP1, don't get too excited.  It contains all of the previous patches, along with a few small fixes.  The only big thing they've added that I'm even moderately interested in is support for BitLocker encryption of multiple volumes through the GUI.  You can only encrypt the boot volume through the GUI right now, and have to use the command line interface for the rest of the volumes.

Oh, and if you thought XP SP2 was big, Vista SP1 is going to run somewhere between 400MB and 600MB, depending on the version of Vista you're running.  You'll need around 5GB of swap space available for the installation.

I'll be testing XP SP3 sometime shortly after Christmas, so I'll let you know how it goes.  I'll probably test Vista SP1 in February, so if you're willing to wait, I'll review that too.

Personally, I'm getting sick of service packs.  In the last two weeks, Microsoft has published release candidates of Vista SP1 and XP SP3, along with final versions of Exchange 2007 SP1, Office 2007 SP1, and SharePoint 2007 SP1.  Do you know how long it takes me to test a single service pack on the variety of machines I'm responsible for and push it into production?


-b0b
(...for the love of God, stagger them!)