On Thu, 1 Mar 2012, Toby Corkindale wrote:
On 29/02/12 22:25, Russell Coker wrote:
I want to play videos in the center of my screen. I don't want to run them full-screen because for some videos that takes too much CPU time and gets video and audio out of sync and for some other videos the resolution isn't high enough (anything scaled up by more than a factor of 2 looks bad).
I also note that even a low-spec, first-gen core 2 duo from 2006 can play back 1920x1080 h264 video (just); so can the slowest Celeron (E1200) from that era. I know because my last media PC had one.
Just a comment on the above situation. I have always been puzzled by posts that indicate deceoding videos requires significant amount of grunt and have alwasy wondered if enough information describing the problem has been given. Back in the bad old days (10 to 12 years ago) when I first started playing DVD's (which defintely would be defined as videos) I used teh following system. Motherboard Gigabyte 6BXD 2 slot 1 pentium 2's at 350 mhz cannot remember the ram now, this system still is in use and curently has 512 Mbytes of ram. Video Card matrox Millenium 2 Symbios 896 dual channel SCSI controler with 3 40 Mhz scsi drives DVD drive Pioneer scsi Mag MXP17F monitor at 1280x960 This system would success fully play DVD's no problems, no hesitations or sync problems. It took around 80% of 1 cpu to do the decoding and scaling to full screen. It is very likely the SCSI controler had a hand in the performance as I found that with this the transfers from the drives required very little cpu power. At the time the general recomendation was that one required at least a 550 mhz cpu to play DVD's. A minor sort of offtopic point here is that the system used to take a llllllllooooooonnnnnng time to crack the DVD's encription, I cannot now remember the player I used. It not being one of the curent crop. Incedently I recently purhased another monitor (a Samsung 1920x1200, performs well) and while they carried it to my car had a talk with the salesstaff. He said they regularly got customers asking for a high performance 4 core system and graphics card just to play videos. Quite where the idea that playing videos requires such high powers comes from I do not know. Curosity killed the cat, Lindsay