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."

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?

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:How for /. has fallen

[jedidiah]

You can use wine to shoehorn this API into Linux.

Although I still remain skeptical that CoreAVC can help an Atom that much. Perhaps they use Phoenix tails somewhere...

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.

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:Broadcom chip

[batkiwi]

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.

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:And?

[DigitAl56K]

If you're playing HD MKV files on Windows 7 just install DivX for Windows. It includes a media foundation component that lets Windows Media Player read the MKV file then decode it using DXVA. If you don't want to install the whole DivX bundle you can even get the component standalone from DivX Labs [divx.com].

Re:Linux...

[auntieNeo]

There's a project that lets you use CoreAVC on Linux [google.com] 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.

Re:How about a free option?

[joe_garage]

codec packs are really never required and often just crap up your system .. Media Player Classic Home Cinema http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ [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 ...

Re:**** HD Videos

[nxtw]

I do have a vga output which can get me 768 lines on my hdtv

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.

Re:And?

[bill_mcgonigle]

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

Re:VLC

[Alcoholic Synonymous]

Since you obviously missed this, TFA is a advert for CoreAVC trying to sell you a magic pill for HD playback by changing the format. TFA doesn't claim no stutter, just less. It's not quite the same to say it's 1080p just because it's 1920x1080 after you've lowered the quality down to substandard level, which is what they've done. More lossy means faster decoding, more so than the total dimension. For what it's worth, if you plan to re-encode your files anyway, you may as well shoot for the screens actual resolution instead of something roughly double the size of the viewable area. Oversized video has to be decoded, then scaled down for a second large performance hit. TFA is still a garbage advert that's promising you something you can never have... 1080p on a less than 1080p screen.

Re:AVC's Secret Sauce

[Anonymous Coward]

CoreAVC doesn't cheat [doom9.org] by lowering quality. The output of a compliant H.264 decoder has to be bit exact in every mode, not just lossless. CoreAVC also uses hardware decoding in newer nvidia cards and there it couldn't cheat even if it wanted to.
Most of the time when people have problems with the look of AVC videos it's a renderer issue [doom9.org] that makes the colours look washed out, but that's not really the decoders problem and can easily be fixed. Another popular problem is people turning deblocking off on the decoder because they think it is optional. Most H.264 decoders provide such an option to speed up decoding if you have no other way to play the video smoothly, but that can cause serious artifacts like blocking and colour drifts that get progressively worse throughout the GOP. Also on doom9 you sometimes get people who claim 2 screenshots show differences between decoders while when you compare them bit for bit they are the same. Just goes to show that if you really want to see a difference you'll see it whether it's there or not.
CoreAVC also doesn't decode video much faster than other (free) AVC decoders these days. ffmpeg came a lot closer to its performance and there is also the DivX AVC decoder and DiAVC which offer comparable performance.

While we are at the topic of video and H.264: Theora is not in the same league as H.264 and claiming so doesn't do it any good. In fact the Theora developers discourage [doom10.org] such claims.

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

[RDW]

'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.