Hardware req's for HD video?

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zurich

Kendoka
Veteran
With all these (gorgeous) XB360 720p trailers coming out, I'm starting to get frustrated at the fact that none of my computers, or computers I have access to, will play these clips properly! Does anyone else have this problem, or is this just MS's way of getting us to upgrade? I'm finding it really quite frustrating.

These are the systems and the specs:

- Athlon XP 2400, 640 megs of ram, R9500 Pro (if that matters): WMV 720p videos stutter and pause, unwatchable

- PowerBook, 1.33Ghz G4, 768 megs of Ram, FX5200: H.264 videos stutter every now and then, somewhat watchable, WMV 720p vids unwatchable

- 2Ghz P4, 256 megs of ram, Intel integrated graphics (PC @ Work): WMV 720p videos barely load, even in a tiny window they stuter and pause, unwatchable

Gah. Is this the next video revolution, ie: back when DiVX made us all upgrade from 300mhz Celerons?
 
Well, I've got a P4 3.0 GHz with a 9500 Pro and I can watch 720p and even 1080i wmv videos without a problem. 720p and above has some stuttering with the new Quicktime 7, but I'm pretty sure that's just Apple's crappy coding.
 
I have a A64 3300+, 512mb PC-3200 and a 5200. I can play up to 720p fine in either program but 1080i and 1080p is a little stuttery... It's all right for a trailer or something but is annoying and gives headaches to anyone watching anything more then a few minutes long...
 
I can only get up to ~36fps in the PGR3 720p 60fps video with my XP 2400+/FSB266/1GB/9800P. That's only in MPC, though--WMP10 gives me maybe half the framerate. I *think* this is with WMV acceleration enabled, but who knows.
 
Ugh, oh brutal. I wonder how the P-M fares in HD video, given the popularity of laptops these days.
 
OTOH, I seem to manage the full 23fps (yeah, weird number) in WMP10 that the Batman Begins 1080p trailer requires (edit: and that at just ~65% CPU!). Can't try it with MPC b/c it requires a license key or some bullshit (it's an advertisement, ffs) that only seems to work via WMP.

Forgot to check the CPU usage with the PGR3 vid.

Deleted the PGR3 video and I don't remember its exact running time, so I can't accurately compare its bitrate to the Batman trailer's. Alls I know is it was around 95MB and maybe 120s, so .792MB/s. BB is 164MB for 144s = 1.14MB/s. Dunno how framerate factors alongside bitrate, either, but apparently PGR3's none too impressed with either my aging CPU or my piddling FSB.
 
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Slightly related to this I had to smile a a gem in this article from Teh Inq:

The facts
Apple and its IBM CPUs are a better choice for Apple Quicktime 7 H.264 content. We don’t have a Mac in the lab so we will have to believe in the specifications posted on the Apple site.
Click to expand...
Now that is high-quality investigative journalism for you :cool:
 
Yup, thus my puzzlement that the apparently higher-bitrate but lower-framerate Batman trailer plays flawlessly, while the lower-bitrate but higher-framerate PGR3 video only plays at about 60% of fullspeed.
 
To the person that asked about the pentium M. I don't know why but the pentium is a beast when it comes to playback of these videos. I had a laptop i think running at 1.2ghz pentium M. And that freaking thing played everything I threw at it.

I was really impressed to say the least.

I didn't understand how it was possible when my machines at home were stuttering. It really is a fantastic CPU.
 
Weirdness, some 720p videos play fine for me, some don't. Has to be something non hardware related. 2.5Ghz of AMD processing power and a 6800 should be more than enough.
 
I think a big limiting factor might be bandwidth, with that much data having to be ferried about, having a good PCI-Express implementation and a high bandwidth memory bus are going to be key. The computational capability of current CPUs are likely more than enough.

Also, I have my suspicions that the codecs are crap (implementation wise).

I wonder if there are benchmarks comparing various IO subsystems using these codecs as a test.
 
OK, I redownloaded the PGR3 trailer. ~55fps using MPC, ~12fps using WMP10 on a 1.5GHz Banias Cel-M, single channel, Intel Extreme laptop. Impressive.

I'm now getting 57+/57+fps using MPC and only ~5/~8fps using WMP10 with my XP2400+ both with/without WMV acceleration checked in ATI Options. It's possible moving from the Cat 5.7 to the Cat 5.9 fixed something, but that doesn't explain ~57fps with WMV accel unchecked in MPC.
 
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