Start Something
Remember my posts on HDV, theoretical and hands-on, last week? Well, I just ran a simple experiment that hammers home my comments on the differing system performance levels necessary to decode a 720- versus 1080-line video stream. At Bill Gates' Monday WinHEC keynote, he showed a commercial from the new 'Start Something' marketing campaign that the company is launching. Sean Alexander subsequently posted in his blog the download links to four versions of the clip, all in Windows Media Video format:
- 300 kbps, 320×180 (streaming)
- 750 kbps, 640×360 (download and play locally, ~5.6 MBytes)
- 8 Mbps, 1280×720 (download and play locally, ~39.4 MBytes)
- 10 Mbps, 1920×1080 (download and play locally, 57.4 MBytes)
I played them back on my Dell Inspiron 700m laptop, with a 1.6 GHz Pentium M processor, 1.5 GBytes of RAM and an Intel integrated graphics subsystem that does not (to the best of my knowledge) support hardware-acceleration of Windows Media Video. The 1280×720 stream, as far as my eyeballs could tell, played back without dropping frames, and the CPU utilization of Windows Media Player 10 never spiked above 65% according to Windows XP Home's Task Manager. The 1920×1080 stream, conversely, pegged Task Manager as soon as the first image appeared on-screen, and it frequently and significantly stuttered the video during playback (I noticed no audio dropouts). This is, I believe, a 1080p presentation; the performance would have been even worse had the PC needed to deinterlace a 1080i stream prior to displaying it on my LCD.
