rumpumpel1
4th March 2008, 12:25
I would like to share the experience I have made when trying to watch HD movies. It gives a rough overview on how much CPU power you need to watch HD movies.
Test candidate was the Blu-Ray version of Ratatouille which I ripped with AnyDVD6315. The single m2ts files were put together with copy /b and finally the whole thing was remuxed with tsremux selecting the video, two soundtracks as well as all subtitles. The resulting filesize was 20GB.
I have used the following two PCs both running Vista Ultimate:
1. nForce 630a with GeForce 7050PV, Athlon 64 X2 5000+, 2x1024 DDR2-800 CL4 (Shuttle SN68PTG5)
2. nForce 570 SLI MCP with EN7300GT, Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 2x1024 DDR2-800 CL4 (Asus M2N-E Deluxe)
All tests were done with no other application running and all sound extras disabled.
The first try was to use WMP11 with ffdshow_beta4a_rev1723_20071224 with the latest version of the MatroskaSplitter.
PC 1: strong sound stuttering almost all the time and the video was also stuttering somtimes.
PC 2: the result was better, video was ok, but still some sound stuttering.
Next try was to use the Media Player Classic instead of WMP11. The result was much better.
PC 1: sometimes a little bit of sound stuttering for few seconds
PC 2: only at one specific scene for a fraction of a second a sound stuttering.
In all cases I checked the CPU load with the task manager. It was pretty much constant at 80% in all test cases.
After googling for a long time finding many others having the same problem but no solution I'm now pretty sure, that this sound stuttering is just because of missing CPU power.
Next try was to disable H.264 in ffdshow and to install CoreAVC Professional Edition v1.6.5.0. This reduced the CPU load by approx. 25%. With this setup even on PC 1 with the WMP11 everything was ok: smooth video and no sound stuttering at all.
Finally I tried to play the movie on a third PC: nForce3 250Gb, Athlon 64 3200+, 2x512 PC400 CL2, Vista Ultimate. Even with the media player classic and using the CoreAVC codec I was not able to watch the movie. The CPU load immediately jumped to 100% and the result was not acceptable.
I did some of the tests using different output devices: 24" full HD, beamer with 1280x760 and a standard 17" with 1280x1024. Concerning the CPU load I could not see any difference.
A friend of mine has a Lenovo T61p running Vista Ultimate with a Core Duo T7800, 3070 MB and a Quadro FX 570M graphics card. He was able to watch the movie even with ffdshow and WMP11 without any sound stuttering.
Conclusion: as long as you don't use some graphics card which supports H.264 encoding you need at least a dual-core CPU running at 2.6GHz for watching HD movies (running Vista)
with smooth video and no sound stuttering. If you think, you can do it with much less CPU power, please keep two things in mind: Ratatouille is a rather extreme test candidate
which uses a high video band-width. Other movies may not using that much band-width. Secondly: if you want to proove that a movie plays fine on a certain platform you definitly
need to check the whole movie. There my be single scenes which need much more resources than the remaining part of the movie.
Test candidate was the Blu-Ray version of Ratatouille which I ripped with AnyDVD6315. The single m2ts files were put together with copy /b and finally the whole thing was remuxed with tsremux selecting the video, two soundtracks as well as all subtitles. The resulting filesize was 20GB.
I have used the following two PCs both running Vista Ultimate:
1. nForce 630a with GeForce 7050PV, Athlon 64 X2 5000+, 2x1024 DDR2-800 CL4 (Shuttle SN68PTG5)
2. nForce 570 SLI MCP with EN7300GT, Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 2x1024 DDR2-800 CL4 (Asus M2N-E Deluxe)
All tests were done with no other application running and all sound extras disabled.
The first try was to use WMP11 with ffdshow_beta4a_rev1723_20071224 with the latest version of the MatroskaSplitter.
PC 1: strong sound stuttering almost all the time and the video was also stuttering somtimes.
PC 2: the result was better, video was ok, but still some sound stuttering.
Next try was to use the Media Player Classic instead of WMP11. The result was much better.
PC 1: sometimes a little bit of sound stuttering for few seconds
PC 2: only at one specific scene for a fraction of a second a sound stuttering.
In all cases I checked the CPU load with the task manager. It was pretty much constant at 80% in all test cases.
After googling for a long time finding many others having the same problem but no solution I'm now pretty sure, that this sound stuttering is just because of missing CPU power.
Next try was to disable H.264 in ffdshow and to install CoreAVC Professional Edition v1.6.5.0. This reduced the CPU load by approx. 25%. With this setup even on PC 1 with the WMP11 everything was ok: smooth video and no sound stuttering at all.
Finally I tried to play the movie on a third PC: nForce3 250Gb, Athlon 64 3200+, 2x512 PC400 CL2, Vista Ultimate. Even with the media player classic and using the CoreAVC codec I was not able to watch the movie. The CPU load immediately jumped to 100% and the result was not acceptable.
I did some of the tests using different output devices: 24" full HD, beamer with 1280x760 and a standard 17" with 1280x1024. Concerning the CPU load I could not see any difference.
A friend of mine has a Lenovo T61p running Vista Ultimate with a Core Duo T7800, 3070 MB and a Quadro FX 570M graphics card. He was able to watch the movie even with ffdshow and WMP11 without any sound stuttering.
Conclusion: as long as you don't use some graphics card which supports H.264 encoding you need at least a dual-core CPU running at 2.6GHz for watching HD movies (running Vista)
with smooth video and no sound stuttering. If you think, you can do it with much less CPU power, please keep two things in mind: Ratatouille is a rather extreme test candidate
which uses a high video band-width. Other movies may not using that much band-width. Secondly: if you want to proove that a movie plays fine on a certain platform you definitly
need to check the whole movie. There my be single scenes which need much more resources than the remaining part of the movie.