Does the GPU improve battery life for video viewing?

alear · 10-31-05, 11:30 AM

Does the GPU improve battery life for video viewing? And does it matter what format it is (i.e. hardware MPEG decoding)?

Thanks

Liquidator · 10-31-05, 12:43 PM

With TCMP, I was able to set the CPU speed to the lowest setting when the Intel 2700G acceleration was turned on. All videos I tested ran fine, so I guess the answer is Yes... probably :)

gillius · 10-31-05, 12:57 PM

Liquidator, do you know what the 2700G accelerates? Decoding and/or display? If it accelerates decoding, which formats does one have to use to be able to use 2700G acceleration?

Storino03 · 10-31-05, 01:01 PM

If it is anything like an integrated video card in computers, then it accelerates everything--screen refresh and video playback, among other things.

Liquidator · 10-31-05, 03:42 PM

gillius: I have tried several formats (DivX, MPEG) and it seems to accelerate these formats just fine. Thus, I guess Storino03 is right.

gillius · 10-31-05, 06:39 PM

I find it interesting that no one has been mentioning H.264 which seems to have a much better quality than either DivX or MPEG?

MSAgent · 10-31-05, 06:54 PM

Originally Posted by gillius

I find it interesting that no one has been mentioning H.264 which seems to have a much better quality than either DivX or MPEG?

H.264 is a CPU hog of death, it's the least processor friendly of all high quality codecs. Most PCs and Macs are not even enable to play High Def H.264 (without serious framedrops) while WM-HD runs flawlessly on the same machines.

nix50v · 10-31-05, 07:25 PM

I view full quality videos that i also view on my laptop using the lowest setting in the processor and acceleration on, so i would guess yes it helps not only a bit but a lot to use the card's acceleration for videos as you can lower your processor by a lot without any performance loss

gillius · 10-31-05, 10:46 PM

Yeah, H.264 is not feasible without hardware accel. On my PC it takes 40% CPU usage to playback a DVD encoded in H.264 (that I encoded myself). But that's why I am wondering if H.264 is or can be accelerated for x51v to make it viable. My x51v is not here yet, but it will be in a couple of days!

Right now I'm trying to find out what is the absolute best video format to use for x51v 624 mhz for 512MB 2hr video transcoded from DVD (475kb/sec video rate). As of now my best guess is H.264+OGG+TCPMP if the CPU can handle it, otherwise DivX+OGG+TCPMP is my second best guess (battery life is important if I can get 2 movies in on one battery, else I don't care much).

motionmind · 10-31-05, 11:03 PM

Originally Posted by gillius

(battery life is important if I can get 2 movies in on one battery, else I don't care much).

I can get one movie (~1.5 hours) and a couple hours of music in with one 1100mAh battery and still have power left. Never really sat still long enough to watch two movies in a row. I usually encode in Divx or Xvid depending on what program I'm using.

I didn't see it on their website, does TCPMP support H.264?

gillius · 10-31-05, 11:31 PM

TCPMP started supporting H.264 in version .65 I believe, but you can't find it mentioned in their mainsite but only on blogs and in the detailed changelogs. It does support it now. I just wonder if it is accelerated by 2700G to be playable or not, and if WMP can play it (desktop version comes preinstalled with H.264).