BlueSky: 901-Type That Does HD Video?

I use my 901 quite bit to watch TV via something called "SageTV".

Think TIVO on steroids with a remote client.

It works pretty well for non-HD, but for HD I have to tell it to
do on-the-fly transcoding and the motion still isn't all that
wonderful.

I'm wondering how much of this is the video card or chipset or
whatever it is onboard the 901.

Been hearing about a new generation of NVIDIA cards that somehow
do a better job of rendering HD.

Is there hope of something with the 901's battery life, but which
can render full HD?
--
PeteCresswell

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
I use my 901 quite bit to watch TV via something called "SageTV".

Think TIVO on steroids with a remote client.

It works pretty well for non-HD, but for HD I have to tell it to
do on-the-fly transcoding and the motion still isn't all that
wonderful.

I'm wondering how much of this is the video card or chipset or
whatever it is onboard the 901.

Been hearing about a new generation of NVIDIA cards that somehow
do a better job of rendering HD.

Is there hope of something with the 901's battery life, but which
can render full HD?

So when you looked for "HD capable netbook", what did you find ?

http://apcmag.com/europe-gets-new-ion-netbook.htm

First, evaluate the video format in question, on a highly capable
hardware platform. To see if the format actually supports
buttery smooth video rendering. Some compression formats aren't
that smooth, so you may be aiming for smoothness where it
can't exist. Depending on the level of compression of the video
format, it may never be possible to get good quality. (This
is one of the jokes of digital TV, where the initial design
may have looked fantastic, but once the cable company twists
the compression knob, it looks like crap.)

Nvidia and ATI has been steadily adding video decoding acceleration
to generations of hardware. They're supposed to be at the point were
almost the whole thing can be done in the GPU. But with so many video
formats, only the major ones may have that kind of acceleration.
For example, you may see a difference in the maturity of Adobe Flash
playback, versus a DVD player application.

ATI AVIVO (UVD 2.2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVD

Nvidia Purevideo (VP3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purevideo

(List of ION netbooks at the bottom - ION is apparently VP3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Ion

The only "guaranteed" solution, is massive horsepower, to cover
corner cases where all the necessary items don't happen to line
up. When you're on a platform like netbook (where I hear Intel won't
let netbook makers use dual core processors), there are necessarily
limits as to how much you can do. Maybe switching up to a laptop
with a screen of the same rough size as your netbook, you might
be better equipped for less than optimal software ?

http://www.firingsquad.com/print_art...icle_ id=2272

"HTPC enthusiasts just want their system to work."

The other problem I have, is finding up to date articles, comparing
performance with the various brands of hardware. If all I can find
is articles from 2007, those may not represent the situation today
in 2009. Without someone to do head to head comparisons on a
regular basis, it is pretty hard to tell what the hardware is
capable of.

Paul

Per Paul:
(huge amount of useful info clipped)

That one made it to my "Keepers" file.

Thanks for the detailed and helpful response.

As anybody reading my OP may have already surmised, I'm not
encumbered with a great deal of knowledge about this stuff.

Having said that, I suspect that what I'm looking for is
rendering of OTA broadcasts in what the TV program guide calls
"HD" or "MPEG2-PS 720P@60 fps".

fps renders ok.

Accordingly, what I did was copy a known "HD" program to a memory
stick. So when I go shopping, I'll just plug the memory stick
into the candidate PC and see how well Windows Media Player deals
with it.

That sb a valid test, right?

--
PeteCresswell

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per Paul:
(huge amount of useful info clipped)

That one made it to my "Keepers" file.

Thanks for the detailed and helpful response.

As anybody reading my OP may have already surmised, I'm not
encumbered with a great deal of knowledge about this stuff.

Having said that, I suspect that what I'm looking for is
rendering of OTA broadcasts in what the TV program guide calls
"HD" or "MPEG2-PS 720P@60 fps".

fps renders ok.

Accordingly, what I did was copy a known "HD" program to a memory
stick. So when I go shopping, I'll just plug the memory stick
into the candidate PC and see how well Windows Media Player deals
with it.

That sb a valid test, right?


Is Windows Media Player what normally plays the content ?

Or does SageTV do it with some of its own code ?

I'm not really that strong on all the details of movie playback,
mainly as I'm not a movie person myself, and haven't had to delve
into solving any problems there.

On the one hand, there is the capability in Windows, to
find a rendering path using CODECs that have been installed
in the system. That might be what Windows Media Player does,
when it is given content. GraphEdit is a program that
allows assembling a chain of components manually.

A way of checking that, is with GSpot. I believe GSpot asks
the system to graft together a chain of filters and CODECs
to render a movie to screen. If you haven't installed any
CODEC packs, then the CODECs would be whatever came with Windows.
When I start this right now, it reports "186 CODECs loaded", but
I can't tell you whether all those came with WinXP SP3 or not.
I haven't been attempting to add to them. I may have added one,
in an attempt to be able to play MythTV content as an experiment.

http://gspot.headbands.com/ (V2.70a)

That should be able to tell you something about the movie type
you hold in your hand, and based on the name of that standard,
perhaps you can determine whether it is one of the accelerated
formats or not.

It says here it is "standard MPEG2".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagetv

And here it says:

http://jimstips.com/category/sagetv-tips

"I don’t know what possessed me, but I went into SageTV’s setup
screens and began playing with all of the "video renderer" and
"video decoder" combinations. After some trial-and-error, I found
that choosing the "VMR9" renderer and the "InterVideo" decoder
produced excellent, stutter-free video on both HD and SD recordings."

That could be from something like InterVideo WinDVD ?

And this gives a demo of the setting up of "graphs" for rendering movies
to the screen. I got here while looking for VMR9.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectShow

And MPEG-2 appears in this article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd

So maybe a DVD player application, could play that content.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpeg2

"Decoders are subject to a royalty of $2.50 per unit"

I have a copy of Cyberlink PowerDVD on a CD that came with an optical
burner. I just installed that in VirtualPC (so it won't pollute the
main OS). I copied over what might be close to your TS file to
that, and it played in a window. It used 99% CPU (there is only
one core being used in VPC 2007 for some reason). It wasn't even
playing back with a large window size. It didn't play in Windows Media
Player. I don't know if that is licensing related or just my lack
of keeping WMP up to date.

Once Cyberlink PowerDVD was installed, now GSpot in that virtual
environment, is reporting it is using Cyberlink CODECs on the
sample file. GSpot wouldn't touch it in my host OS (WinXP) with
no Cyberlink software installed.

I thought applications like PowerDVD and WinDVD are the kinds
of things that may have the capability to use an Nvidia GPU and
its VP3 video decoder. I don't know if WMP can tap into that
or not.

Before I installed PowerDVD, the version of WMP on that VirtualPC,
wouldn't play the test movie. After PowerDVD was installed, then
when I tested WMP, it was able to play the movie. So it looks
like the Cyberlink PowerDVD installer and whatever CODECs it installed,
are now being used by GSPot and WMP.

It suggests if you walk to a local store, with movie in hand, there
is no guarantee the candidate netbook will have the CODECs. The
copy of WMP on the machine might not touch it. I don't know if a
more modern OS like Win7, would come better prepared for this
test or not (i.e. a $2.50 decoder?).

The test movie I used, is "HD sample clip (250MB - 1:42)" here.
You can compare what GSpot says about your SageTV clip, versus
that sample.

http://www.nextcomwireless.com/R5000/samples.htm

While VLC player and FFMPEG may seem like a free way to do a test,
the problem would be that FFMPEG likely doesn't use the Nvidia hardware.
So if you test that way, you're likely using CPU for that.

Paul

"Paul" wrote in message
...
(PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per Paul:
(huge amount of useful info clipped)

That one made it to my "Keepers" file.

Thanks for the detailed and helpful response.

As anybody reading my OP may have already surmised, I'm not
encumbered with a great deal of knowledge about this stuff.

Having said that, I suspect that what I'm looking for is
rendering of OTA broadcasts in what the TV program guide calls
"HD" or "MPEG2-PS 720P@60 fps". fps renders ok.

Accordingly, what I did was copy a known "HD" program to a memory
stick. So when I go shopping, I'll just plug the memory stick
into the candidate PC and see how well Windows Media Player deals
with it.

That sb a valid test, right?


Is Windows Media Player what normally plays the content ?

Or does SageTV do it with some of its own code ?

I'm not really that strong on all the details of movie playback,
mainly as I'm not a movie person myself, and haven't had to delve
into solving any problems there.

On the one hand, there is the capability in Windows, to
find a rendering path using CODECs that have been installed
in the system. That might be what Windows Media Player does,
when it is given content. GraphEdit is a program that
allows assembling a chain of components manually.

A way of checking that, is with GSpot. I believe GSpot asks
the system to graft together a chain of filters and CODECs
to render a movie to screen. If you haven't installed any
CODEC packs, then the CODECs would be whatever came with Windows.
When I start this right now, it reports "186 CODECs loaded", but
I can't tell you whether all those came with WinXP SP3 or not.
I haven't been attempting to add to them. I may have added one,
in an attempt to be able to play MythTV content as an experiment.

http://gspot.headbands.com/ (V2.70a)

That should be able to tell you something about the movie type
you hold in your hand, and based on the name of that standard,
perhaps you can determine whether it is one of the accelerated
formats or not.

It says here it is "standard MPEG2".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagetv

And here it says:

http://jimstips.com/category/sagetv-tips

"I don’t know what possessed me, but I went into SageTV’s setup
screens and began playing with all of the "video renderer" and
"video decoder" combinations. After some trial-and-error, I found
that choosing the "VMR9" renderer and the "InterVideo" decoder
produced excellent, stutter-free video on both HD and SD recordings."

That could be from something like InterVideo WinDVD ?

And this gives a demo of the setting up of "graphs" for rendering movies
to the screen. I got here while looking for VMR9.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectShow

And MPEG-2 appears in this article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd

So maybe a DVD player application, could play that content.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpeg2

"Decoders are subject to a royalty of $2.50 per unit"

I have a copy of Cyberlink PowerDVD on a CD that came with an optical
burner. I just installed that in VirtualPC (so it won't pollute the
main OS). I copied over what might be close to your TS file to
that, and it played in a window. It used 99% CPU (there is only
one core being used in VPC 2007 for some reason). It wasn't even
playing back with a large window size. It didn't play in Windows Media
Player. I don't know if that is licensing related or just my lack
of keeping WMP up to date.

Once Cyberlink PowerDVD was installed, now GSpot in that virtual
environment, is reporting it is using Cyberlink CODECs on the
sample file. GSpot wouldn't touch it in my host OS (WinXP) with
no Cyberlink software installed.

I thought applications like PowerDVD and WinDVD are the kinds
of things that may have the capability to use an Nvidia GPU and
its VP3 video decoder. I don't know if WMP can tap into that
or not.

Before I installed PowerDVD, the version of WMP on that VirtualPC,
wouldn't play the test movie. After PowerDVD was installed, then
when I tested WMP, it was able to play the movie. So it looks
like the Cyberlink PowerDVD installer and whatever CODECs it installed,
are now being used by GSPot and WMP.

It suggests if you walk to a local store, with movie in hand, there
is no guarantee the candidate netbook will have the CODECs. The
copy of WMP on the machine might not touch it. I don't know if a
more modern OS like Win7, would come better prepared for this
test or not (i.e. a $2.50 decoder?).

The test movie I used, is "HD sample clip (250MB - 1:42)" here.
You can compare what GSpot says about your SageTV clip, versus
that sample.

http://www.nextcomwireless.com/R5000/samples.htm

While VLC player and FFMPEG may seem like a free way to do a test,
the problem would be that FFMPEG likely doesn't use the Nvidia hardware.
So if you test that way, you're likely using CPU for that.

Paul

Elecard has a sale on for their MPEG Player v 5.6, you might
download their 30 day trial .

http://www.elecard.com/products/prod...r/mpeg-player/

It makes good use of a number of the hardware accelerations
available.

( The Elecard DirectShow Codec and filters are nice to have on
your system, as well. I can't be sure installing this player makes
them available, but I have them from several other of their
products.)

Luck;
Ken