Beh.

[johnridley]

My desktop machine at home does everything I want, EXCEPT it's totally incapable of keeping up with high def video playback, and is anciently slow when handling it at all, like making DVDs from HD streams. When playing back, it just displays the first 2 or 3 frames and gives up, continuing on audio only.

I took an HD file from the camcorder to work today on a thumb drive, and this machine plays the video without even breaking a sweat. It's a 3GHz Intel Core Duo. Both machines are running up-to-date video drivers, and both are playing with the same version of VLC which has fully self-contained codecs, so there's no difference there.

Now I need to decide whether this is grounds for replacing the machine or not. I can donate the old machine to the church and probably wind up with a $200 tax credit as a result, so it's probably actually not all that expensive to upgrade. Still, it's irritating to replace a machine that still meets ALMOST all of my needs.

Comments

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

Is it only when dealing with the DVD? Every so often mine decides to go to PIO mode and has to be forcibly shoved back to DMA.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Not on the DVD at all. Playing h.264 1080i streams recorded on my camcorder from a SATA hard drive. The machine at work can play them without difficulty from a cheap 8GB thumb drive.

Almost anything, probably even a cell phone CPU, can play a DVD, the codec (MPEG2) is balanced to be CPU-intensive on the compression but easy to decompress. h.264 is a lot more CPU-intensive to play, since it was designed years later. It's a hell of a lot more efficient, but it requires horsepower.