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."

Comments

And?

[psycho12345]

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?

Re:And?

[batkiwi]

-VDPAU is a decoding library. MPlayer (and many other media programs) supports VDPAU.
-mplayer WITHOUT an external hardware accelerated decoding library will not be able to play 720p/1080p files on a netbook without severe stuttering (or possible complete failure).

Re:And?

[0100010001010011]

Crystal HD would also be a valid solution.

XBMC supports it. I'm not sure if mplayer itself does yet.

It turned my AppleTV into a 1080p beast. Just need a Mini-PCIe slot.

And if you're reading this and HAVEN'T heard of XBMC you're missing out on hands down the best HTPC front end ever made.

I've used it since '05 and on an original XBox and they've come a long way.

Re:And?

[bill_mcgonigle]

$ cat ~/bin/mplayer-slowcpu
#!/bin/sh
mplayer -autosync 30 -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all $*

Re:And?

[James Durie]

Nah. Usually just older.

Re:And?

[Minwee]

If only there were some kind of manual for programs like mplayer. Then you might know where to go to find that kind of information.

Skip this story

[syousef]

It's no more than an ad for a codec.

VLC

[Alcoholic Synonymous]

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?

Re:VLC

[Hadlock]

Where can I buy a 10" 1080p netbook?

How for /. has fallen

[tji]

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.

Re:How does this CoreAVC compare to K-lite?

[Barny]

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.

Which of you fucktard voted up Spam?

[pecosdave]

Seriously, this is looks like any of the rest of the spam, especially with the opening statement.

Get the right netbook

[Sheik Yerbouti]

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.

Re:You will also need

[LoverOfJoy]

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.

Slippage? What slippage?

[SuperKendall]

I'm buying a 17" netbook later this year.

The name just feels lighter!

AVC's Secret Sauce

[evilviper]

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.