HP DV7 very choppy on Hulu full screen via HDMI

[StageLeft]

This has the dual core M600 with 4 gigs ram and Radeon 4200. Hulu on the laptop itself is fine full screen at Hulu's high-res. Blu-ray full screen via HDMI is also fine onto my TV, but when I run the Hulu through HDMI at full res the CPU seems to strain and video is very choppy. Even on hulu low res but full screen via HDMI it's choppy. Is this to be expected? I should have checked youtube HD but didn't...btw this is laptop running on battery; I don't know if this would actively shuttle CPU speed or not when on battery.

EDIT: Just tried youtube and in HD full screen it looks stunning via HDMI, no choppiness whatsoever. These HDMI hookups really are the ticket, finally a living room TV is up to snuff with a monitor.

 

[ther00kie16]

Youtube is a lot easier to run than hulu. You'll have to check advanced power options and min/max cpu. The new adobe flash should support gpu acceleration but it's currently beta I think.

 

[tcsenter]

The new adobe flash should support gpu acceleration but it's currently beta I think.

Good luck getting a new ATI driver from HP that supports it. This is the only reason I do not purchase notebooks with ATI Mobility graphics (whether discrete or integrated parts) from the big OEM brands - you are forced to depend on the OEM for drivers. Sure, you can use the Mobility Modder thing, which will break the driver signing (the digital signing will no longer be valid). Not too important for 32-bit Windows but under 64-bit Vista and Win7, using unsigned drivers can break things.

I just got a killer deal on an off-lease Dell Latitude D630 with NVIDIA Quadro NVS 135M (basically GeForce 8400GS). The latest mobile graphics drivers from NVIDIA (with acceleration support for Flash videos) fully supports this graphics part and installed just fine.

 

[StageLeft]

It seems scanning the net that Hulu's 480 is poorly done and stresses systems to a great extent. Is this something that's likely to improve in the near future with software updates from Adobe? I'll check min/max just to be sure it's not throttling me on battery.

EDIT: display was somewhat toned down on battery but putting it to max perf has done nothing. Honestly, even on the 360 it's not perfect when full screen but only through HDMI.

 

[ther00kie16]

Seems like flash 10.1 is out. Get that and you should be fine as it has hardware support for flash.

 

[Knavish]

Yeah hulu / flash is a pig when you full screen it. You'd think that upscaling a 480p image to 1080p (I assume that's what you're trying to do?) wouldn't be *that* hard, but the hardware accelerated flash 10.1 should improve it. Anandtech did a review on that a while back: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3678

FWIW, I had a Core2 Duo E2160 (1.8Ghz) & a Nvidia 9600GT that would drop lots of frames with 1080p fullscreened 480p hulu.

 

[Knavish]

Seems like flash 10.1 is out. Get that and you should be fine as it has hardware support for flash.

I think it's still in beta. The edition I see for download is 10.0.42.34.

...***Adobe Flash Sucks***

 

[ther00kie16]

Yea, it's beta 2 but there are plenty of people using it just fine.
Download here:http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

 

[nordloewelabs]

this might not help much, but i'll say it anyway...

you can try using the QUALITY > LOW option by right clicking the video once it starts playing. the 480p stream should look great, regardless of your TV set's size. i usually play the default 360p stream on my 37" (my Athlon 3000+ can not handle Flash well normally) and, while it looks a bit jagged, it isnt much.

if that doesnt fix your HDMI problem, head to www.monoprice.com and get yourself a VGA cable of whatever length you need. their cables are of great quality and cheap! they have adapters too so you might be able to get a HDMI>VGA adapter or something like that (they have LOTS of different adapters!). it might address your problem.

btw, if you like Hulu, make sure you check out the Shows (and Movies) on YouTube, Crackle (owned by Sony) and PBS:

Shows & Movies on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/shows
Shows & Movies on Crackle: http://crackle.com/shows/index.aspx?c=82&name=Movies
Shows on PBS: http://video.pbs.org/

 

[StageLeft]

Thanks, y'all.

It may be obvious to others but just to be perfectly clear: full screen high-res Hulu works on my laptop just fine. It's when I go through HDMI that it's choppy. It's like it goes from standard 24 FPS to perhaps high teens. Enough that it's not quite possible to watch. Is there extra crap that goes on out of HDMI to make this inevitable, or is it the 480->1080P upscaling that is to blame? Perhaps if I set the tv to 720 I'd be in better shape? The laptop itself sees the tv as a 1920X something or other but I found even putting it down to a 1024X768 didn't make much diff.

Now, I have a mobility radeon 4200, which is a supported GPU in flash 10.1. I installed Flash 10.1 successfully, but the adobe "what version of flash do I have" still says 10,0,xx,xx. I suppose I may have to try totally uninstalling the old version, unless their site version page doesn't work with 10.1, but certainly vid was unchanged after...

 

[MJinZ]

Thanks, y'all.

It may be obvious to others but just to be perfectly clear: full screen high-res Hulu works on my laptop just fine. It's when I go through HDMI that it's choppy. It's like it goes from standard 24 FPS to perhaps high teens. Enough that it's not quite possible to watch. Is there extra crap that goes on out of HDMI to make this inevitable, or is it the 480->1080P upscaling that is to blame? Perhaps if I set the tv to 720 I'd be in better shape? The laptop itself sees the tv as a 1920X something or other but I found even putting it down to a 1024X768 didn't make much diff.

Now, I have a mobility radeon 4200, which is a supported GPU in flash 10.1. I installed Flash 10.1 successfully, but the adobe "what version of flash do I have" still says 10,0,xx,xx. I suppose I may have to try totally uninstalling the old version, unless their site version page doesn't work with 10.1, but certainly vid was unchanged after...

If you're running 2x displays with your 4200, your GPU may not be able to keep up with things like HULU.

Try the same thing plugged into, not on a battery power.

Use max power settings

Disable your Laptop display and use only the TV.

See which one works.

 

[StageLeft]

If you're running 2x displays with your 4200, your GPU may not be able to keep up with things like HULU.

Try the same thing plugged into, not on a battery power.

Use max power settings

Disable your Laptop display and use only the TV.

See which one works.

Still no love

However! I uninstalled Flash and then properly installed 10.1. Window-only CPU use was unchanged for high res hulu at about 23% but when I went full screen to the TV the CPU dropped from a constant 62% to 40-something on Flash 10.1 and most importantly it's now watchable, high res hulu on my tv, sweet! Thanks, folks. I did only try it with the one show for a few seconds but it was definitely a change.

 

[jlee]

I've had luck fixing Hulu playback issues by right-clicking on the video, going to settings and disabling hardware acceleration. FWIW.