HP 2133 Mini-Note

HP 2133 Mini-Note Vista Movie Playback

Continuing on with my reviews of the 1.6Ghz Mini-Note (KX870AT) this time I’ll be focusing on video play back.

Web Videos

I tried out various videos on Hulu, YouTube, Metacafe and Break to test the Mini-Notes Flash (FLV) movie playback. Videos from each site, except Hulu, played back watchable but did have some noticeable dropped frames. Nothing too terrible though. Hulu played back awful. The Mini-Note just couldn’t keep up with their videos.

AVI Videos

I was very impressed with the Mini-Note’s performance playing back AVI movies. I tried two different movies which played flawlessly in small or full screen modes. The only issue I ran into was when resizing the Windows Media Player window. The video would seem to get delayed and then rush to catch up. (it looked like it was fast forwarding, but the audio was fine). I was most impressed by the fact they still played perfect with the processor running at 800Mhz instead of 1600Mhz.

While they did play great with no other active apps, when surfing the web or using Word they did start dropping frames or the audio would get out of sync.

Details of the videos used:

Video 1

Filesize: 1.5GB

Frame Dimensions: 720×304

Data Rate: 227kbps

Total Bitrate: 449kbps

Framerate: 23fps

CPU Usage: 45-60%

Video 2

Filesize: 700MB

Frame Dimensions: 608×336

Data Rate: 103kbps

Total Bitrate: 112kbps

Framerate: 23fps

CPU Usage: 30-40%

QuickTime Videos

QuickTime’s high definition video trailers really left something to be desired. The 480p version was the only one close to being watchable, and only then after you waited for it to completely download. The 720p and 1080p versions dropped frames like crazy and were unwatchable (unless you like audio slideshows). Any of the videos in full screen also didn’t not playback acceptably either.

On the SD side of things, the Small and Medium sized trailers played great. The Large sized trailer played very well once it finished downloading the movie. While it was downloading there were some dropped frames and jerky motion.

DVD Playback

To test DVDs I borrowed an internal Lite-on DVD/CDRW drive from one of the desktops and connected it to the Mini-Note with an IDE to USB converter. For playing the DVD I used PowerDVD 8. DVD playback had a lot of dropped frames and audio that skipped in either small or fullscreen modes. Sadly it wasn’t enjoyable at all.

Summary

Overall I think the Mini-Note with Vista handles video playback fine considering it’s not really meant for that sort of thing. Hopefully when 2133 is refreshed with Isaiah or Atom in the coming months we’ll see a big improvement on video playback.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.