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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."
I wonder....
No sig today...
Because _nobody_ would have known in advance that decoding 25mbit+ of 1920x1080 h264 (a task that redlines even dual core desktop cpus) could be a battery consuming activity.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I don't know, my new computer here looks fi
Blu-ray discs have optional support for "Managed copy". For those discs that enable it, there's nothing stopping the manufacturers from shipping a tool allowing the user to copy the disc to the laptop's hard drive in a form that's easier to play. The user can build a library of stored content while the laptop is plugged in, and then watch it when it's not. Supporting this feature would also beat carrying around discs everywhere. I can honestly say I've used my laptops to watch full DVDs four or five times in the entire time I've had the capability, it's just not as practical as it appears, and I hate taking discs on vacation with me that I might lose.
HD DVD made "managed copy" mandatory for discs with DRM, but, alas, it's Blu-ray that's the remaining widely supported HD disc format. (I'm not calling it the victor, it still has to beat downloads, and SD.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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Perhaps this is finally the sort of problem that will stur average joe consumer to be dissatisfied with the state of current battery technology, stirring innovation? Personally, I can't wait for Mr. Fusion in my laptop. My kids would all be the next WWE superstars with those kinds of irradiated swimmers in my loins.
mmm...muffins
Even when my battery was new, I still wouldn't get more than 3/4 of the way through a DVD before having to plug in.
Low end laptops never could play through a complete movie, regardless of whether it was on DVD or Blu Ray.
It doesn't matter how much power Blu Ray consumes - there will always be a laptop manufacturer who skimps on the battery to cut costs. If you want to watch movies on a portable device, you have to buy a personal media player. Sad, but true.
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Since HD DVD used the same lasers and the same compression codecs I believe this would have applied to HD DVD also. This is not a case of "if only HD-DVD had won" but a basic technology problem.
If the laser in a Blu-ray drive uses remotely as much as your CPU or LCD backlight, you're going to be burning a hole through your laptop in just a few minutes... Where does the media go to always find these moronic analysts?
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Is there any reason a high power laser is needed for reading? Writing may have a power requirement but I would have thought that to read a disk you could make up for a lowered power laser with a higher sensitivity detector.
New higher capacity optical storage medium takes more power to use?
CD-ROM then CD-RW then DVD then DVD-RW/RAM and now BR... each step started with high power requirements and weren't suited for mobile use. And almost every one of them was met with this kind of fud. After evolution of the technology we seem to be surviving just fine with our current optical medium.
It's just going to take a few revs. of hardware improvements.
As for HD Video playback... well, that's another problem - just the shear size of data needed to be decrypted and decoded... ouch.
Another disaster of DRM is the power required to do all the decryption. Al Gore should go after the media industry for the waste of electricity and subsequent carbon foot print. While he's at it... Why not pressure HD-DVD hardware makers to release the (non-encryption related) specs of the machines on the market so they can be turned into MythTVs and other devices?
Then he can attack the printer manufacturers for adopting a printer & and ink/toner pricing plan that encourages the consumers to through away printers because it's cheaper to buy a new one than to refill it.
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
Interesting... I wonder how HD-DVD and Blu-Ray compare in this regard? Anybody know?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Except the main consumer of power is maxing out the CPU to do the highdef H.264 decoding in real time.
Words cannot adequately describe how idiotic that statement is... Divx is MPEG-4 ASP, much older and less advanced than H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is the primary codec used to encode highdef discs.
How in the world you're expecting to use an OLD codec to reencode a video stored in a NEW codec, to reduce the file-size of a video by a factor of 5, while NOT losing HUGE amounts of picture quality, is vastly beyond my comprehension.
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What effect does decoding a hidef movie have on the power consumption for your laptop cpu and memory?
This problem is not limited to illuminating the laser.
liqbase
While I had the edit screen open and was talking to a colleague, someone else answered the question: no.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Last night I played Transformers 1080P Blu-ray rip (10GB MKV file) in my Vaio VGN-FZ340E.
I used "Media Player Classic" with latest K-lite codecs, using the just the stock battery and a medium power saving mode and everthing went fine for the entire movie.
Yes, playing this files may not be legal but I just don't see a better or legal way to do HD with my current hardware.
Same thing happens if you try to play a Blu-ray movie (Assuming you have a drive) with Linux.
Why on earth would you need to watch a High Def movie on your laptop? Laptop screens are so tiny. Even if you are using your laptop to play a movie on a bigger screen, like your 1080p 52 inch TV, I would assume there would be a power outlet near by.
It's the same old story, to a point. The performance required to do a relatively simple job (play fullscreen video) in a new way (using HD content and a new storage medium) means that it becomes impractical without upgrades. I can remember having to tweak computers to be powerful enough to play MP3's without skipping, but there at least you had the advantage that the storage space saved compared to even the best-compressed formats of the time was phenomenal.
I freely admit that I absolutely do not "get" the HD fuss. It's the same thing we've had for years, with more pixels, that you can't reasonably see on a fair test past a certain distance (although I would say that on a high-res laptop you are more likely to spot the difference because of the unusually close eye-screen distance), with new storage formats, new compression, new software, new DRM and new performance characteristics... which are killing battery life. And, yes, eventually they'll start making "blu-ray acceleration cards" just like MPEG-acceleration, 3D-acceleration, etc., although in this day and age they're called "software on the GPU". But at the end of the day, you've gained little (a higher res that you might not be able to distinguish) for enormous performance increases.
Where's the advantage in it when a "Blu-ray" PC can still play the DVD's of previous years but at much, much less expense... if you can play a blu-ray for two hours or you can play MPEG-2 for six (while compiling stuff in the background without jerkiness) on the same machine, what are you going to end up using if you watch a lot of video on your laptop?
When I go away and know that I might want to view movies on my laptop (e.g. long trip staying in cheap hotels, stay over at a friends house etc), I take either DVD's, or I have a bunch of MPG's/AVI's/VOB's etc. on the laptop itself or on DVD-R's ahead of time. Quality isn't really the factor there and the advantage to having everything in a simple format that everyone can read easily and which doesn't tax the laptop is key.
It's another case of "laptop = general purpose computer, so let's turn it into a media centre and make it do everything". It's nice that it's CAPABLE of everything but you can't expect a portable device to do it all AND give you good performance at everything. Laptops are not even desktop-substitutes for most work (the times I have to explain this to people... it costs pounds to repair a broken desktop, hundreds to repair a broken laptop).
Let the early adopters waste their money. Even if Blu-Ray becomes the de-facto standard, I'd much rather just decrypt-to-disk and convert to a format that's easily readable, with extremely cheap media, that plays the video "good enough" for most things if I'm intending to carry it around with me. Much better 1 x DVD-R with a couple of full movies on it that I can watch one-after-the-other and make a backup copy for pennies than 1 x Blu-Ray that I can't give my friends with only a single movie on it that kills my batteries just watching it.
There was a time when I did exactly the same with DVD vs VCD - it's actually trivial to just copy several DVD's worth of movie/tv show to a DVD-R or even a CD-R and not worry about the quality. You're travelling - who cares whether it's HD or VCD-quality so long as you can tell what's going on without eyestrain?
This might be a good time for me to try to sit through Star Trek IV or Highlander 2 again.
Blu-Ray: making crappy old movies only half as crappy.
Blu-ray In Laptops Could Be Hard On Batteries/i?
Blue-ray is like Viagra?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Transformers was one of the pivotal movies NOT available in blu-ray
ony DVD and HDDVD
the director was in the news quite a bit, heavily opposed to this decision by the studio
transformers still is unavailable on blu-ray- althought that is expected to change.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Case in point, I have a couple of projects I've done with DVD footage. The DivX/XviD version comes to about 95mb. The exact same thing encoded in h.264 at the exact same quality (720x480) clocks in at about 45mb. If I kept the same filesize, I could scale it up to 1280x720 easily (would look like ass since the source isn't that high to begin with, but you see the point). There is no way you could take a high-def movie and compress it to 8gb in DivX without sacrificing quality.
The only win you're going to get with this route is saving power due to decreased CPU usage. Rendering h.264 video in realtime is notoriously taxing on CPU's, ESPECIALLY at HD resolutions. But if you drop the quality, you lose the entire point of having a high-def copy in the first place.
And to the people talking about the lasers eating up power, yes they do. To an extent. Along with maxing out the CPU, the biggest drain on the battery is the drive itself. It's a moving part. It spins. ANY optical drive when in constant use is going to drain the battery a lot faster than just sitting idle or reading a few files every couple of minutes.
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
And here's me, with no CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-ROM or even BluRay. True it's an ultraportable laptop, so the things are neither needed nor desired. I could understand wanting BluRay in a multimedia laptop, but those things rape their batteries anyway. You want battery life away from the mains? Get an ultraportable. Simple.
(Oh, and I have a good music and video collection stored locally on the laptop)
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.
I happen to be a professional, and I know of NO such codecs. Not one.
DRM, metadata, and streaming are completely and totally independent of the underlying video and audio codecs.
Some people are very happy with vinyl records. Some people are legally blind. That does not change the facts.
I will ignore the rest of your purely trolling comment.
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While I have seen HD-rips in Divx or Xvid, most of them, by far, has been done in H264. And two hours of video nicely fits a single 4.7gb DVD-R with acceptable quality.
The big space-saver (and CPU as well) is resizing that 1920x1080 stream down to a more reasonable (and closer to your average laptop resolutions) of 1280x720.
I'm lucky to get an hour of battery life on my dv9000t with max power-save settings as it is. Playing a Blue-Ray movie? I might get through the opening credits...
HD BlueRay on a 19" screen?!? I cant see the difference on my 32" screen... talk about overkill
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Matroska is a container format; it is not a codec, in any sense, and is never referred to as such by anyone with any knowledge of the subject.
Wikipedia is not a dictionary. And one vastly over-simplified summary explanation does not change the definition.
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Yeah, you could do that, but then why do you even need BluRay? We could just put Divx movies on plain old DVDs and have HighDef movies without even having a new disc. If you're going to rip the disk, you might as well rip it to a DVD resolution file, and make it only take up about 1 GB. You probably wouldn't even see the difference given the size of the screen and the quality of the sound card.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's the decoding. H.264 in particular (which is getting to be rather favoured) but all the codecs on Blu-Ray take a ton of computation to decode. We are talking like 90% of both cores on a dual core CPU. That is what hits the battery really hard. Copying to a HD won't fix that.
What probably will start happening is some hardware acceleration of the process. The newer models of the nVidia 8800 series support hardware acceleration of the HD codecs and it apparently take a bunch of load off the CPU. Something like that could presumably be made to work in a laptop (maybe already has, I don't know about the mobile 8800 capabilities).
two hours of video nicely fits a single 4.7gb DVD-R with acceptable quality
Perhaps for sufficiently low values of acceptable.
1280x720? I'm willing to accept that some laptops have that resolution display, but who else wants that resolution? I want 420p/i, 720p/i or 1080p/i resolution. Why would I ever want anything else? I have nothing at that resolution (laptops in this house are 1680x1050, 1600x1200, and 1024x768; my external flat panel is 1280x1024.) I would a million times rather have the 1366x768 of 720i/p, because systems are optimized to handle common resolutions, and I might actually see an output device that resolution which is utterly unlike the experience I will have aith 1280x720. Honestly, I'd rather have 720x480p.
It makes much more sense to deliver a full-resolution stream and allow the user to generate their own derivatives for whatever devices they actually own.
But then, I guess that's why I'd want to do my own rips. As my televisions are SDTV (480i) and XGA resolution (the projector) I actually have no need yet for full-HD content, but it would be kind of neat to be able to rent, transcode to something that will fit within XGA nicely, watch on the projector, and delete.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because so-called "high-def" is really "high-res" video?
Everyone is claiming that downloading will kill Blu-Ray. It won't for at least the near future. IF we take even the most common Blu-Ray format around (single layer 25GB), you cannot compress it into DivX without losing a lot. Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) these days use more advanced codecs than DivX (h.264 or VC-1). H.264 is known formally as MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding), while DivX is known as MPEG-4 ASP (Advanced Simple Profile). DivX is much better than MPEG2, but isn't a contender at all when compared to AVC.
Until one can download 25GB easily, most "high def" is around 720p. Sure that's "good enough" for most people, except it's also horribly overcompressed. Even comparisons of various downloaded "HD" videos show slight improvements against the standard-def version, but were clearly inferior to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD and even Cable. One review even said "save your money and just download the standard def version".
Isn't a laptop with 1080 lines of resolution pretty rare? Will a 1050-line laptop scale the image or just crop it? I'd hope that there is a crop option, since the scaling would probably use even more CPU and degrade the image.
1080i is really 1920 x 1080 - while it's not quite common yet laptops shipping with higher resolution screens have been supporting that resolution (or a bit more).
Scaling though is a pretty lightweight effort for the system, especially compared to the decoding. You'd always have the image scale rather than crop, which is really way more desirable - the only reason pan & scan works is that someone is controlling which part of the film gets cropped off, you can't arbitrarily say the sides or the right or the left can be cropped and expect a movie to be watchable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Some people are very happy with vinyl records." Probably because they're higher quality than CDs. And given that any portable player will likely not be a CD player, you don't need the master disk to be portable any more. It only makes sense to buy vinyl and rip to you digital format of choice.
Quicktime is a multimedia player and encoder program, just like Windows Media Player or Real.
The file format is MOV (and MP4, a subset of MOV).
The most recent video codec is H.264
The most recent audio codec is AAC.
Of course it has used many other video and audio codecs over the years.
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"(Score:-1, Insightful)"
heh.
This is the second time this week I've noticed someone moan about their overuse of Latter Day Saints. What the feck is going on? Has the overuse of Lysergic Software Distribution clouded your mind?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
90% of the movies I rent aren't available yet in HD, so "meh".
Actually 1080p on a 42" TV is pretty amazing - you can definitely see the difference between 720 and 1080 at 42". Right now about half of the 42" TVs I've been shopping for are 1080p. Go see it at a TV store where the staff are sufficiently not-dim-witted and actually connect all the HD TVs to HD sources.
1024-line laptops are common enough, but to display a wider picture than 4:3 aspect ratio you'll need to downsize the picture to 700 or even less. Only lamers crop off the ends.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Laptops with Blu-Ray have been available for a year now. What's with the "could be"? It should be pretty damn easy to test.
The cake is a pie
Blu-ray uses a 405nm laser while HD uses a 650nm laser. Photons emitted by the Blu-ray laser therefore will contain 60 percent more energy than the HD photons. Bottom line is that one would expect a shorter-wavelength laser would use more power, all other things being equal. Maybe blu-ray is the wrong format for laptops, though I don't know why anyone would want to watch a high-res movie on a little laptop screen anyway.
I'm guessing that this can't be generalized to everyone, but just as food for thought... I don't use my laptop's optical drive. In fact I wish it wasn't on here, it's deadweight, and a waste of space (perhaps a bigger battery?). I just as soon copy movies to my hard drive and play them from there (and if you can't do that with blueray yet, it's just one more reason not to use it)- or even over the network. Even if I did have a Blueray drive in this thing I'd probably never use it for movies- too noisy! I'm looking forward to the day when optical drive are no longer required for software installs and all of my content is on my solid state drive. Hopefully that's not too far off. I was so glad when floppy drive were finally banished, I don't miss them.
Matroska is a container format. Which is not a codec. Go ahead and grep that Wikipedia page for the word "codec" and you'll see what I mean.
No comment.
And more to the point...when people can easily STORE 25GB of data for one movie. That's one of the reasons I like Blu-ray so much...the discs have MASSIVE storage capacity for a disc.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
BFD. They make it seem like it's a Blu-ray only problem. I'm willing to bet HD-DVD would have been in the same boat if it had not died. Besides, decoding high def video isn't a low-power job. These people should shut up.
No, no. Don't underestimate the users.
BlueRay and HD-DVD are standards which means they are not going to change a lot in the future. MPEG4AVC/H264 and VC-1 are the current 2 codecs for those disc format, and will stay that way for the whole life of the medium, until the next standard appears.
On the other hand computers are quite evolutive and easily upgraded both in terms of software and hardware.
And I'm sure lot of people complained that MPEG-1 couldn't compress as well as DVDs' MPEG-2 and thus quality had to be degraded to shrink movies to fit into CD-Rs.
Then came MPEG4 (First microsoft's implementation, a.k.a DivX;-) 3.11, then other implementations) and the rest is history.
Today we already see some next gen codec being developed. Wavelet will probably be the way. We already have some motion compensated wavelets codecs like the opensource Dirac. And there are even more complex possibility like full 3D wavelet (Tarkin has been experimenting in that direction. It has been currently put on hold to concentrate on Theora - because currently that one is good enough. But it's very likely that once the need for better compression arises, there will be again an incentive to work on such advanced compression algorithms).
Those wavelet technologies will probably play the role that MP3 played with music and MPEG-4 (mainly DivX and similar) played with older DVD formats, in shrinking media to smaller sizes. Which is actually good, because it'll enable users to take their movie libraries with them when on trips.
Also with the development of technologies like GPGPU will probably help bridge the gap between fully hardware acceleration by highly specialized circuits for popular standard formats like H264 or VC-1, and slow software implementation of more recent and less widespread experimentl ones.
People can do it. Bittorrent has the capability to handle such huge files. It's already popular to download full seasons of TV series of such sizes.
The only problem will be 3rd world countries that don't have such a high speed networks, and USA where ISP have oversold the actual available bandwidth in "unlimited" plans and are now limiting the peer-2-peer traffic of their user to make up for the difference.
But here in Europe transferring dozens of gigabytes is a reality. I personally use OpenSUSE Linux (which comes on a couple of DVDs) and Debian (which comes on even more DVDs). Their installation ISOs total for several dozens of GB, but I managed to download them flawlessly using bittorrent, even if here Switzerland is known to be slightly behind in terms of bandwidth.
And in Japan it's probably even easier for them with the much higher speed internet connections.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...it would be kind of neat to be able to rent, transcode to something that will fit within XGA nicely, watch on the projector, and delete. Yes, don't forget the delete.Somehow along the way I made a bad choice in life and now must live with 0 Karma.
Words cannot adequately describe how idiotic that statement is... Divx is MPEG-4 ASP, much older and less advanced than H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is the primary codec used to encode highdef discs.
How in the world you're expecting to use an OLD codec to reencode a video stored in a NEW codec, to reduce the file-size of a video by a factor of 5, while NOT losing HUGE amounts of picture quality, is vastly beyond my comprehension.
Perhaps he means no huge visible loss of quality? Especially if he has a lower resolution laptop display, in which case you can throw away tons of information with no loss in quality, since the HD source would have to be scaled down anyway.
Kate Beckinsale can suck the power out of my battery anyday!
/DVD Vampire!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
With video compression, you get diminishing returns from downscaling. If you downscale by a factor of 4, you can only reduce your bitrate by a factor of 2, at best without much additional quality loss. You won't get anywhere near a factor of 5 reduction in bitrate (particularly if also downgrading to Divx in the process), unless you're downscaling to sub-DVD resolution.
It's a nice theory, but still doesn't add up.
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