720p & Netbooks

[[Mike of the Desert]]

In these last months I tried to see some Anime series while traveling to my Job's place.. And it was a success if not for the HD ones. I tried a lot of things to make this work but I'd like to know your opinion. :s Is it possible in any way to play 720p videos on a Netbook? (1080 I don't even ask) It's an HP single-processor 1.6Ghz with 1GB of Ram. I have installed on my PC the CCCP Codecs and the CoreAVC. Mplayer Homecinema lose a lot of Audio/Video synch and so losing even seconds of it.. While VLC simply destroy the video with huge pixels every 4-6 seconds. Do you know any way to make this possible?

[Zarxrax]

In coreavc there is a setting to make it skip all the deblocking. This makes it look noticably worse, but should give a decent speedup. I can watch SOME 720p content with this setting enabled. If its something with lots of motion like an AMV, it generally wont play well though.
Another possibility is to reencode the things before you send them to your netbook. Downscale the resolution to 480p, and encode it with x264. If you use some of the faster presets, it can generally reencode it quite quickly.

[Qyot27]

I'd look at multithreading support. Which version of CoreAVC, for instance, or using ffmpeg-mt for H.264 decoding in ffdshow rather than libavcodec. Those Atom processors do support multithreading, right?

The recent coding boosts x264 has gotten really let the decoding process be more efficient as well. This computer of mine is 8 years old and using r1373 to encode with fairly insane settings* resulted in being able to practically watch 480p24 at full speed with ffdshow and even closer to full speed out of mplayer**. And I'm far more certain the specs on netbooks are several times beefier than what this desktop has.

*x264 --preset placebo --crf 18.0 --thread-input --deblock 1:1 --b-pyramid normal --scenecut 100 --aq-mode 2 --me hex --no-dct-decimate --output "output.mp4" "input.avs"

**Although I did have to encode on a different computer so that it would take 2.5 hours to process a 4-minute AMV. The note here is that weight-p, MB-tree, and the fact MB-tree and b-pyramid can work together brought the bitrate down to absurd levels while maintaining the quality. Bitrate is really the single determining factor, and the lower the bitrate, the easier job it has of decoding; CABAC being enabled simply adjusts what the upper bitrate threshold is - CABAC on, the threshold is lower, but not impossible to skirt underneath.

[Qyot27]

**Although I did have to encode on a different computer so that it wouldn't take 2.5 hours to process a 4-minute AMV.

Fixed.

For reference, those settings encoded the video in about 20 minutes on my mom's HP laptop (I think it's one of the dv9800 series, but I'm not sure). That's about what I can encode this video in with Xvid on mine, so I figure that's fine.

[mirkosp]

Actually, some atom netbooks can get 1080p playback with coreavc without the need to disable the deblock...
But well, on yours, I'd say that re-encoding sounds like the best solution.

[Pwolf]

i've been able to get decent 720p playback on my dell mini 10. I'm using CoreAVC but I also use the hardware decoder. It's a little tricky to get working and it's very particular about what it likes tho so not everything will decode on it but when it does, it works really well.