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How To Play HD Video On a Netbook
Barence writes with some news to interest those with netbooks running Windows: "Netbooks aren't famed for their high-definition video playing prowess, but if you've got about $10 and a few minutes going spare, there is a way to enjoy high-definition trailers and videos on your Atom-powered portable. You need three things: a copy of Media Player Classic Home Cinema, CoreCodec's CoreAVC codec, and some HD videos encoded in AVC or h.264 formats. This blog takes you through the process."
Or I can just get an ION powered netbook, install Linux and use VDPAU, and play any HD without any issue. Why is this news?
It's no more than an ad for a codec.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This works for Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD... Step 1. Install VLC. Step 2. Done. I use Hulu Desktop on my Aspire One under Ubuntu NBR, and there is no magic to it. How did this shit make the main page?
Well you could be a traveling businessman, have your work on a netbook, but be able to hook up to the conference room HD projector and show your HD Powerpoint (wonder if MS has made that pitch yet "PowerPoint IN HD!!!!). More likely an HD video preview of a product to customer?
I expected some homebrew usb2.0 or somesuch gadget with a hardware decoder ... That would have been slashdot-worthy, but hey, it would have been old news ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Come on.. an advertisement for a commercial codec to use in a Windows system / application?
How did this make it as a story?
I could maybe understand a story about doing this on an OSS system. But, that would not have been news because many of us have been doing that for years.
When the OSS Nvidia or Radeon driver gets full VDPAU support, that merits a front page story.
K-lite is just a codec pack, most of these use the standard ffmpeg for h.264, the multi threaded version of which is still "experimental", also coreavc not only is extremely optimised it also supports CUDA, so if you have an NV based netbook it will run much better with very little CPU usage.
I own a copy of coreavc for all my machines I expect to play h.264 on (3 copies), and was very happy to see haali splitter (along with coreavc) is now 64-bit, so full windows media centre support :)
It works, its cheap, I like paying programmers/companies who do a good job, it makes a nice precedent.
...
Sure or you could just be a cool dude who has some HD videos on his netbook who is visiting a friend who wants to watch a movie. You just happen to have the newest Spiderman on your drive and your netbook sports an hdmi out. You now have a tiny portable media server. How cool is that? I mean your netbook is now not just only for browsing the web. You can actually maybe use it to watch a movie, or several even if the ion's claims to battery life hold up. I mean they are shipping with like 160-320gb hard drives now. Might as well use the space up. Throw a ton of mp3s on it and take it to parties, with batteries that will go for hours. If someone does not at least see some novelty or usefulness in this, then they can just go back to their huge tower that they can't take anywhere. My computer (not a netbook, but a 14" acer) is always with me. There are a million reasons that portable can be highly utilitarian and the smaller the better.
zosxavius photography
What good is 720p video on my 1024x600 monitor? Too bad they don't make 600p videos.
They're about $40 for the mini-pci-express addin card, and the problem is you will lose wireless (easily fixable with a usb dongle though...).
XBMC has support, other programs are coming online quickly.
Seriously, this is looks like any of the rest of the spam, especially with the opening statement.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Just buy the right netbook the Asus 1201N plays High def video perfectly well because it has an Nvidia 9400M graphics processors with Cuda and hardware video decoding. It will even output 1080P via it's HDMI port. It also has a dual core Atom 330 running at 1.6 ghz. All together it's a hell of a gadget for the money.
You make some good points, but you've made one serious mistake. A "cool dude" would not have the lastest Spider-man movie on his drive.
As long as the screen resolution is high enough view HD why would HD video take any time or money to get?
The video itself is copyrighted and DRM'd, and the most common codec used to store it is patented and compute-intensive.
Actually, that's basically my process.
I save all of my DVDs as iso, move them to an external drive, then play them through my netbook (MSI U210) which has 720p HDMI output.
The image quality is definitely superior to my DVD player hooked up directly to the TV, and better yet, it doesn't force me to watch with a 4" black border if I want to see the subtitles.
...and driving good speakers takes more power. I agree with fm6 that netbooks are undermarketted but the space factor and at least the illusion of long battery life are not compatible with a good speaker system.
Hell, today's artificially-loudened-during-mastering transient-loaded bass-heavy music like this* would shred even laptop cones.
*Fun fact: early in the song, a "hot bowl of grits" is mentioned.
Or... you could download CCCP, and just use that. With a bit of tweaking and just the stock codecs supplied one can easily get a 720p/1080p video playing on a standard retail netbook. However with an uncompressed bluray rip or something of that nature I'd imagine you're out of luck, I've never tried myself. The ability to play HD video on a netbook is easily obtainable free if you are using the right file format/player and have the proper codecs. As I said though for the average person just download CCCP, it's a free cure-all for your media playing woes with few exceptions. I'm not sure why this is even posted here. Anyone buying a netbook at a retail store isn't getting anything above a 600p monitor and those of who take the time to shop online for a 1366x768 netbook are more than savvy enough to get it working, not to mention the typical Slashdot posters. Even then I can't imagine a Slashdotter buying netbooks this day and age what with similarly priced ultraportable laptops at the same size that are thinner, more powerful and feature 8-12 hours of battery life standard (Timeline series from Acer for example). I suppose some of us have kids and family members we'd buy netbooks for though. For a standard 600p netbook though why even bother with this? You want that 400i/p video you got off the internet or from your digital recorder to look nice? Use some nice upconversion software and play it like that to save resources. No way in hell you'll be able to run a real-time quality up-conversion player on a netbook though.
I'm buying a 17" netbook later this year.
The name just feels lighter!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Don't know why that popped into my head. I was thinking of newer movie franchises that sucked and that popped in first.
zosxavius photography
Nothing wrong with using a computer as a cheap but decent upscaler. Lately all I've been using is windows media center and media player for video. The quality is great with the right codecs. Don't know what's up with VLC these days, but it doesn't seem to do scaling very well, or at least the last time I tried. Media player works great though. I mean, all I need is a time bar and some buttons at the bottom when I move the mouse and that satisfies those needs and plays anything I have codecs for. :)
zosxavius photography
The secret to CoreAVC's speed is that it cheats... If you compare the frames output, with any other codec, you'll see that the results are not the same. People have commented on how CoreAVC looks different, sometimes "fuzzy". Again, it's going for lower-precision in exchange for speed. This is particularly galling in the case of H.264/AVC, since it has lossless modes, which are supposed to be bit-exact, not "close enough".
Honestly, if you want slightly faster + blurry video, why don't you just grab a lower-resolution copy of the same video, and save yourself the disk space, and money on the software license.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There's a project that lets you use CoreAVC on Linux using mplayer and wine. I've used it to play 1080p on my slightly underpowered Opteron box. I'm not sure if it works for the latest versions of CoreAVC though.
codec packs are really never required and often just crap up your system ..
Media Player Classic Home Cinema http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ has built in EVR renderer and plays 1080p files (at at least up to 40mps bitrate) on ION netbooks and ION 330's using the GPU instead of the CPU ..
also - XBMC has two different branches out now that use GPU acceleration for perfect 1080p playback hardware like above ...
Seems like a problem with your setup. My HDTV supports 1080p VGA input, and any netbook with the GMA 900 or newer should support output at this resolution.
'Shame the article doesn't do any actual comparisons between any two codecs.'
I compared CoreAVC with ffmpeg, vlc etc. a while back, using a Samsung NC10 Atom-based netbook to play relatively low bitrate 720p stuff from the BBC iPlayer (thanks to get_iplayer). CoreAVC was the only codec that came close to handling these videos (most just ground to a halt after a few seconds). MPC + CoreAVC gave decent picture quality on a 720p TV, but some audio synch issues and slight cyclic speeding up/slowing down of playback. Skipping deblocking as the original article suggests may help with this, but really killed the picture quality for me, with obvious blocky artefacts. It was an interesting experiment, and actually the first time I'd seen HD playback on my TV, but not quite good enough for regular use. YMMV.