![]() But good luck getting everything set up in Windows XP. Anandtech found that, when properly configured, the latest video cards can significantly reduce the H.264 decoding burden on the CPU ATI reduced it by half, and Nvidia reduced it by a fifth. But the configuration, drivers, and software necessary to achieve this acceleration is daunting. If you own a relatively new video card, it is possible to offload some of the video decoding chores from your CPU to your video card's GPU. At least we have a few legitimate uses left for the ridiculous amounts of CPU power we've inherited over the years. They look better in less space, but they also require a lot more CPU power to decode. H.264 and MVC-1, however, are truly next generation encoders. It'll look awful and take up a lot more room than it should. Woe to the poor consumer who buys a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc encoded with the ancient MPEG-2 encoder. ![]() Both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD allow three different encoders: Windows Media, by all accounts, offers a very good next generation encoder, but it isn't the only encoder on the block. The mainstream PC is only now catching up to the performance required to watch high definition video.Īll the video samples I cited are in Windows Media format. Dual core does this especially well, although it appears to do so by brute force load sharing rather than any special multiprocessor optimizations in the decoder. Driving 1920x1080 requires a lot of grunt – both in terms of pixel-pushing video bandwidth, and also in terms of CPU power for the advanced encoding used to keep the file size down on these massive resolutions. It clearly requires a lot of CPU horespower to render high definition video. I doubt any PC system could play a true 1080p clip at the time these clips were mastered. I have a sneaking suspicion the reason Microsoft redefined "1080p" as 1440x1080 had to do with performance. Note that DirectX Video Acceleration was enabled in each case. I compared CPU usage in Task Manager during full-screen playback of each clip in Windows Media Player 11 on a few systems I have around the house. Interlacing has a lot of problems and should be avoided whenever possible. Interlaced video modes are generally considered inferior to progressive video modes, and should only be used if you have no way to enable progressive modes. Interlaced means resolution is effectively halved vertically in time frames alternate between odd and even lines each cycle. The official definition of 1080p is 1920x1080, so I'm not sure what Microsoft was thinking there. The official television resolutions break down as follows: You'll also note that Microsoft has an odd definition of 1080p. The resolution is the same, and the bitrate looks comparable. Note that I included the Step Into Liquid promo because it's the only clip on the WMV HD Showcase page that requires an abnormally large amount of CPU power to decode. Most of the clips had similar performance characteristics, so I chose one clip from each category. ![]() But the bitrates and sizes are still representative. It's a tad out of date now – most of these sample high-definition clips were mastered in late 2003 or early 2004, long before HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. I'll start by comparing three clips from the Microsoft Windows Media High Definition Showcase page. I'm seriously considering buying one of the $199 Xbox 360 HD-DVD kits and retrofitting it into my Home Theater PC. You can watch them on your computer without a subscription, but if you want to watch them on an Apple TV or a Roku you need to pay up.Now that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are starting to enter the market in earnest, I thought I'd revisit HD video playback on the PC. Hulu, to use an American example, offers thousands of shows and movies online for free (with ads). Even better: if that fails, the option of simply opening the browser is always present. A computer means you can watch whatever you want, because clever developers work hard to ensure these sites work with software like XBMC. You just want to watch stuff media companies want to control what you watch, and where. Here are a few reasons to use a computer as your media center. Setting up a computer is a little more work than an out-of-the-box solution, but the advantages far outweigh the downsides. If you try XBMC and don't like it, that's okay: you could set up Plex instead, or look into other options. It's not complicated to hook up a desktop computer to your TV and set it up as your XBMC media center. James outlined why you don't need a smart TV, saying basically that the "smart" bits will be obsolete long before you should be buying a new TV. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |