Minimum HW requirements for smooth video playback

[Madwand1]

Please pardon the n00biness of this post. I have to buy a notebook for someone, and haven't had one of my own for a long while. So I went down to the local Best Buy and looked at several of them. Looking at the Geek Squad video that's conviently installed on all of these laptops, I noticed that the lower end laptops would play the video back with stalls and jumps, whereas the higher-end ones would be much smoother.

Specifically, a Celeron M 420 (1.6 GHz) and a Sempron 3300+ (2.0 GHz) running an ATI 200 graphics card were noticably jerky, whereas others, including a Turion 2.0 GHz with an nVIDIA 6150 were smoother.

Now I don't really care about the Geek Squad video. (It's kind of short and artistically speaking, lacks intellectual sophistication, although it can be quite emotionally moving... oops, what was I saying?) Oh yes, this notebook will be used to play DVDs and who knows what else down the road.

Questions:

1. Why are the lower-end notebooks jerky in playing these little bits of video?
2. What components and performance levels are needed to avoid this jerkiness? (CPU model/speed, graphics, etc.?)
3. What does it take to have smooth DVD playback?

 

[phisrow]

Smooth DVD playback should be pretty easy. On desktops, software DVD decoding has been trouble free more or less since 400MHz PIIs came into fashion. I have seen some laptops where DVD playback was jerky if the DVD drive was in PIO mode; but switching to DMA fixed that.

Divx and Xvid should also be playable on more or less any modern hardware(My old XP2100+ desktop had the CPU for it, and my current laptop has the HDD performance for it, and neither leans on the video card).

As for the Geek Squad video, it's hard to say without knowing the specifics of that clip(codec, bitrate, etc).

In general, though, I'd say that CPU/GPU doesn't really matter(except for HD, which is really a whole different story). Faster is better with HDD; but most modern ones are fast enough. My bet would be that the lower end laptops didn't have enough RAM. Not enough RAM + integrated GPU that steals RAM + OEM/Best Buy preloaded shovelware = not enough RAM to do much of anything properly.

 

[corkyg]

Basically, you get what you pay for. Cheaper models have less RAM and cheaper video processors.

When shopping, take your own DVD movie and see out it plays from the DVD drive. That's part of "shopping."

 

[Madwand1]

I should have mentioned that these all had 1 GB RAM as far as I recall, so RAM shouldn't have been a problem. I guess I should check out the drives further.. maybe the cheap ones have smaller cache sizes or some other performance limitation. I think they all had modern 5400 RPM drives, so it wasn't a 4200 RPM vs. 5400 RPM issue.

I might collect the HD details and then look up the specs for the next steps.

I'd figured out the "take your DVD there" part, but wanted a better understanding of reasons for differences.

Thanks for your replies.

 

[corkyg]

Understand - it then boils down essentially to differences in the video chipset/processor used.

 

[andrewbabcock]

I have a gma 950 and video is pretty smooth... Choppy video is probably due to the ram and the software that drives the video. Modern components can run video pretty smoothly most of the time so i wouldn't worry about it. As long as you have enough ram and your software is as it should be you will have smooth video.

 

[TheStu]

i have the gma950, but with a core duo.... i have noticed that if i try to play anything higher than 720P the video gets choppy... but then again, i have a 13" screen, so i have no need to play anything higher than 720P anyway

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: Madwand1
1. Why are the lower-end notebooks jerky in playing these little bits of video?
2. What components and performance levels are needed to avoid this jerkiness? (CPU model/speed, graphics, etc.?)
3. What does it take to have smooth DVD playback?

Try disabling Norton Internet Security.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: Zap
Try disabling Norton Internet Security.

Great comment, Zap - but I really doubt that the store demo model was running NIS.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: Zap
Try disabling Norton Internet Security.

One of the lower-end notebooks (a Toshiba) actually lists NIS 2006 in the online specs (a time-limited trial version, I'd guess). I remember seeing stuff like that on some of the computers, but didn't pay much attention. Thinking about it, I wouldn't be surprised at all if all the demo computers had something like that installed.

I'll try disabling it. Thanks.