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    Is a top of the line W500 really incapable of H.264?

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by lifesizepotato, Apr 29, 2009.

  1. lifesizepotato

    lifesizepotato Notebook Enthusiast

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    I'm getting pretty frustrated with my new W500 Elite. It has the 2.8 GHz processor, 4gb RAM, Vista 64, and the Blu Ray drive.

    I found out recently that the Blu Ray drive can't write dual layer DVDs. Kind of annoying, but not a HUGE deal, I guess.

    Now I'm trying to play my first Blu Ray movie on it, Marley and Me. It's an MPEG4 H.264 disc.

    It's completely unwatchable. It's jerky, skips frames, and stuttery whenever there's any kind of motion on screen.

    Apparently, the majority of Blu Ray discs coming out are encoded in MPEG4.

    Is this computer, with its 512MB GPU and 2.8 GHz Core Duo processor, really not able to handle this type of disc? I feel like I basically wasted $500 on the Blu Ray drive that won't even be able to play most of the movies out there. :mad:
     
    lifesizepotato, Apr 29, 2009
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  2. jaredy

    jaredy Notebook Virtuoso

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    No it is perfectly capable playing it. It is probably just your decoding setup. Or maybe your power settings :p.
     
    jaredy, Apr 29, 2009
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  3. MidnightSun

    MidnightSun Emodicon

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    That's a software issue, not hardware.
     
    MidnightSun, Apr 30, 2009
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  4. shoelace_510

    shoelace_510 8700M GT inside... ^-^;

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    ^ Agreed. Your system is more than capable to watch blu ray extremely smoothly. :)
     
    shoelace_510, Apr 30, 2009
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  5. yuio

    yuio NBR Assistive Tec. Tec.

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    yah, my AMD Athlon 7750 2.7Ghz with the HD3200 Desktop has no trouble with H.264 at 1080p.

    what software are you using to play the blu-ray disk?
     
    yuio, Apr 30, 2009
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  6. jonlumpkin

    jonlumpkin NBR Transmogrifier

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    Blu-Ray tends to require a GPU to accelerate the decoding of H264 as the bitrates on most Blu-Ray discs are obscenely high (often 40+ mbps). Both the x4500 and FireGL 5700 natively support this decoding.

    However, you need to make sure you use a player that supports DXVA (Direct X Video Acceleration) on these cards. I know that Cyberlink PowerDVD 9 includes a compatible h264 codec and there should be a Blu-Ray edition of that. I would recommend you try PowerDVD 9 if you haven't already.

    Additionally, if you are trying to play back Blu-Ray disks on battery you should choose "Video Playback" or another power profile that has the CPU set to "Adaptive" rather than "Slowest" as you may need more than 800MHz even with GPU acceleration.
     
    jonlumpkin, Apr 30, 2009
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  7. lifesizepotato

    lifesizepotato Notebook Enthusiast

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    I think it turned out to be the power saver feature. I forgot that it has effects on the processor, too. I switched it to high performance, and not only does the Blu Ray seem to play fine now, but the rest of my software runs faster, too! Glad I started this thread. ;)

    For what it's worth, I'm using PowerDVD 9.
     
    lifesizepotato, Apr 30, 2009
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  8. domaxx

    domaxx Notebook Geek

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    domaxx, Apr 30, 2009
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  9. jonlumpkin

    jonlumpkin NBR Transmogrifier

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    Glad that fixed your problem.

    My personal recommendation would be to run on Adaptive Always (both battery and AC). This gives the benefit of substantially reduced power consumption/heat generation when not under load and comes at little to no performance penalty compared to "High performance".
     
    jonlumpkin, Apr 30, 2009
    #9