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Blu-ray In Laptops Could Be Hard On Batteries
damienhunter notes a Wired story on the power-hungry ways of the first generation of Blu-ray players coming soon to a laptop near you. "With the Sony-backed HD format emerging victorious from a two-year showdown with Toshiba's HD DVD, many laptop manufacturers are now scrambling to add Blu-ray drives in their desktop and notebook lineups. Next month, Dell will even introduce a sub-$1,000 Blu-ray notebook... But the promise of viewing an increasing variety of HD movies on your laptop may be overshadowed by ongoing concerns over the technology's vampiric effect on battery life. Indeed, if the first generation of Blu-ray equipped laptops are any indication, you might not get more than halfway through that movie before running out of juice completely, analysts say."
A solution to cut costs on laptops and extend movie play battery life:
HD-DVD laptops!
The drives are cheap now, and since you won't be able to get movies for them soon, no worries there either!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Use a notebook with a real GPU, anything modern from ATI or NVIDIA, and the GPU will take care of much of the decoding more efficiently than the CPU alone can. The new AMD Puma platform (2Q2008) ought to be particularly good about this.
The parent said: "you could get a pretty good HD quality movie down to about 8GB with Divx, without any real quality drop"
An intelligent observer might note (this is probably the part you're having difficulties with), that a newer codec does not necessarily mean a higher compression ratio.
Some codecs are invented for the sole purpose of adding meta-info to a media file, adding DRM, or changing the way it can be streamed (or not) over a network.
In fact, one can create a new codec (notice the magic key-word NEW) that does nothing what-so-ever and actually performs far worse than 'cat movie.raw.uncompressed >
And Yet, it would be newer. (You're probably so shocked by this point that you're starting to doubt your faith and upbringing - that's about time if you ask me)
You see, having a "NEW" thing does not imply anything on the "PROPERTIES" of the "NEW" thing. And certainly does not imply anything regarding the compression ratio.
Getting back on topic,
many people are very happy with the quality that can be achieved with XviD using a few gigs of data and can barely tell the difference between that and a H.264 uber NEW 25+MBps HD+++ codec.
That is what the parent meant.
Sigs are for the weak.
Anyone who uses the work "lappy" outside quotes should be
kicked to death in the street.
Well, let's reffer to wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec
"A codec is a device or program capable of performing encoding and decoding on a digital data stream or signal."
Do you know the Matroska Project?
http://www.matroska.org/
It's an Audio/Video container format, it does not define how the video is compressed in terms of algorithms and whatever, but it does add useful meta-data - nontheless it is a CODEC!
some kind'a expert you are...
Sigs are for the weak.