HP Mini-Note XP Movie Playback
Web Videos
I again tried Hulu, YouTube, Metacafe and Break to test Mini-Note’s Flash movie playback in XP. I’m happy to report they’re all much better. YouTube, Metacafe and Break all play perfect or near-perfect in full or screen modes. In small screen Hulu still plays choppy, but it’s watchable if you really want to see something. Hulu’s full screen mode is still pretty bad.
AVI Videos
There really weren’t any major issues with AVI playback in Vista, but it does playback smoother while multitasking in XP now. With the video size at 100% there were hardly any dropped frames while surfing. At 200% it started dropping some more, but you’re not likely to notice while multitasking.
Quick Time Videos
The SD video trailers still played great in XP, and the 480p only dropped a few frames here or there. You still need to wait for it download entirely for best performance though. Unfortunately the 720p and 1080p were still pretty bad with QuickTime.
At Peach1200’s suggestion I tried the K-Lite codes and Media Player classic with the high-def trailers. It was 100 times better using those. The 480p and 720p trailers played flawlessly. The 1080p trailer would barely play at all though. (Get K-Lite Mega Pack w/Media Player Classic)
I also tried web surfing while watching the Iron Man 720p full-size in MPC which did cause it to get a little choppy. I would say it’s a little worse than the Superbad AVI at 200% while browsing.
DVD Playback
This time around I tried PowerDVD 6 as well as PowerDVD 8 to try out some DVDs with. This time around playback was perfect - no skipping or choppiness. (by the way, PDVD6 Isn’t compatible w/Vista)
While surfing DVD playback was heavily affected by it. The audio wouldn’t drop but playback would freeze for a few seconds from time to time and plenty of dropped frames.
Summary
As expected the Mini-Note’s performance is much better with XP on it instead of Vista. The processor is much more capable without a bloated OS slowing it down. Check out the video of it in action.
For details about the AVI files used or to see the Vista results take a look at the HP 2133 Mini-Note Vista Movie Playback Test.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Thanks again for the great effort you’re putting in all these tests!!
..now, i have another suggestion for you.. let’s see if we can squeeze some more juice from the mini-note!!
As far as I know, hardware acceleration shouldn’t work with the normal version of Media Player Classic.. but it should work with the Media Player Classic Home Cinema edition: http://tibrium.neuf.fr/
It’s free too!
Josh, maybe you could try it and tell us if there’s some other improvement..
May 6th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Dear Josh,
Thanks a lot for your tests,
it’s awsome
I heard somewhere that the batterylife on XP was verry bad im comparison to Vista, can you confirm this?
Could you maybe make some batterylife tests like they did on :
http://www.blogeee.net/2008/05/05/asustek-eeepc-900-le-test-partie-2-evolutions-genealogie-et-autonomie/
Would be great!!!!
Thanks for al the input
May 6th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
@Peach1200
I tried it out and it did play the 1080p trailer slightly better. It still really wasn’t watchable, but I could tell it wasn’t dropping as many frames. The audio was still pretty choppy in either one though.
*EDIT* Actually I had it scaled to fit to screen. At normal size, it played back about the same (1 frame every 4 to 5 seconds) in the regular MPC. In the hardware accelerated MPC it was a lot smoother, but still had dropped frames. The audio gets choppy at around 30 seconds in though, and it got out of sync as well.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
This is amazing to watch. I was thinking you could roll a quarter across the keyboard and freak everyone out about the actual screen size.
This is very relevant because everyone at work that has seen my HP2133 has asked about video performance. Great job!
Can you show CPU utilization during video playback? Is it 100% flat?
May 7th, 2008 at 12:48 am
Would you tell the config of your machine ? tks
May 7th, 2008 at 7:54 am
@Cruis
I have the KX870AT: 1.6Ghz CPU, 120GB 7200RPM HD, 2GB 667Mhz DDR2 RAM, XP
May 7th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Great video Josh! Very helpful. Are you by chance running some benchmarks under XP (Geekbench, PCMark, etc)? When do you think you will have those to post?
May 7th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
I’ll have the XP benchmarks up tonight!
May 7th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Did the 1.2 cpu with 1G RAM is still ok on playing ‘youtube’ ? Thank you.
June 23rd, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Ive been trying to squeeze decent video playback on both XP and Vista. Success!
Happy to report these as good to go:
1.Divx movies in player (Quicktime and DIVX)
2. VLC player (Videolan)most formats
3. Windows media player playing DIVX movies
Three players all give good playback with no frameloss etc.
Itunes and quicktime still suck for playback even with the the KLite codecs.
the moment. However, the quicktime codec download is put to good use by the other players.
Enjoy the movies!