On 06/03/12 09:56, Lindsay Sprinter wrote:
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.
[snip: which was a p2 350MHz] Note that back in the old days, videos were encoded in ways that didn't require much grunt to decode. eg. MPEG1 They were also usually only low resolution, eg less than 250k pixels. By the time you get to today, you're looking at video encoded in things which use boatloads more CPU power to decode. Also the videos are higher resolution, just over 2000k pixels. Try downloading some 1920x1080 content encoded in MPEG4-AVC (High 10 profile) with styled subtitles and multi-channel sound, and see how you go playing that back?
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.
Yeah, don't get me started.. one of my parents bought a fairly high-end system with a dedicated high-end graphics card, because they seemed to think that was necessary to watch videos and view photos. Never played a 3D game on it in their life. :(