HD video playback on a Q1U-P, Q1P UMPC
Just to give you an idea in the performance difference between the new Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium and the older Q1P, I’ve got a comparison of H.264 playback. A 720p HD movie trailer in Quicktime, the upcoming Indiana Jones movie to be specific. At a 5.8 Mbps bitrate, this pushes beyond the limits of what should be expected from a UMPC, but I think it’s important to see how these devices handle it. One thing this video got me thinking: I hope I look as good as Harrison Ford at his age!We’ll have the full-quality, VGA video available for direct download on our Mobile Media Edition page in the next day or two. Until then, enjoy!
Have you tried the CoreAVC codec? If not you can greatly enhance playback performance. It’s made for smoother playback on lower performance machines like a UMPC. I’ve had laggy performance on my 1.06ghz core 2 duo tablet with Vista but after getting the codec, all my 720p movies play at 100%. It’s worth the 8 bucks but I initially had trouble getting it to work. You need a player like media player classic which can customize codecs. Also to obtain Apple trailers without Quicktime you can go to http://www.hd-trailers.net to save movies to your hard drive.
Thats a standard QT install right? (not qt alternative)
That it even plays at half frame rate is pretty impressive. A 3mbps h.264 should be more than enough to satisfy most people.
Steve
So, wait, the Q1P is running Vista on 2 gigs, and the Q1 U is running XP/SP2 on 1 gig? That was the last configuration, as I recall.
BTW, I found that lousy, skipping, choppy video on my Q1P that I upgraded to Vista (all the drivers loaded now, thank heaven) and 2 gigs still yields good results on an external monitor. I can’t say if they’re great results, as I don’t watch Hollywood productions, but the quality of, say, those GottaBeMobile hi-res downloads, whatever those are compared to Hollywood (other than being better produced and more interesting).
You mentioned previously that the buttons don’t rotate; I assume you mean scrolling down means scrolling left (or right) when the screen has been rotated. Is that what you meant?
You also said the mouse button is better, but the track stick on the Q1P isn’t really a track stick unless you hold down the menu button, too, and it’s still jerky and lousy. I hope you show/describe the new feature in more detail. That sounds important.
Do you think the better video is more dots, or Core Solo vs. Pentium M, or some other feature?
Thanks for the video, Kevin – very interesting!
I’m looking forward to seeing how that exact video will perform under Vista and with 2 Gigs of RAM on the Q1UP…
zunq, there are definite alternative codecs out there that will boost performance, but I’m treating the Q1U-P review as an out-of-the-box experience so folks know the minimum to expect. What they do or use after it’s out the box is up to them!
Steve, that’s standard Quicktime for the reasons I just mentioned.
bluespapa: correct. The Q1U-Premium is running XP with 1 GB of RAM. The Q1P is running Vista with 2 GB of RAM. Yes, scrolling down with the buttons or stick when the device is rotated 90-deg clockwise scrolls left. With the Q1U-P you can just use the stick as a mouse; you don’t need to hold the Menu button like you did with the original Q1s. I’ll cover it in a video because the stick is actually has a dual-function. I think the better video is due to the hardware able to decode the source file faster / more efficiently.
Andreas: thanks… I’m looking forward to it as well!
This is a slightly odd test you are comparing a 1280 pixel wide video at:
Mac @ 1280 wide
Q1U @ 1008 wide
Q1P @ 780ish wide
So as well as decoding the image the Q1U and Q1P have to do a non-trivial scaling from…
A better test would be to have a fixed size window on both the Q1P and Q1U to show how well they scale the video to a common size.
Also, I wonder what specs the Q1U mentioned on Engadget for the education market will have.
I also look forward to the next generation of mobile processors with embedded GPUs which should be able to decode/scale the HD video without breaking a sweat.
Yup, you’re 100% correct. But here’s why I didn’t have a fixed window size and show the difference. People don’t care how it will work on windows of equal horizontal and vertical res.
What I mean by that: they’re likely going to watch the movie as it fits best on their device. Arguable yes, but I wanted to explain my reasoning.
Kevin, Quicktime player is notoriously inefficient on Windows. The same files that would drop frames like crazy on QT player will play like a dream on WMP Classic or even VLC.
Never EVER use Quicktime player, even for quicktime wrappered video files, on Windows.
Just FYI.
Shogmaster, I’m not suggesting that QT is the best way to play H.264 files. I tend to use VLC myself, but I wanted to go with a commonly known piece of software.
I know the video is about processor performance on three machines. I have an underpowered machine. It has a Crusoe processor at 800mhz. Very slow for multitasking. I cannot even play QuickTime files with this computer. I found an ultra efficient codec that is really good. It is called coreavc. I am still not able to play high definition files on my computer, but can play 640×480 h.264/AVC files pretty well. What is cool about using this codec is the integration with Windows media player. I have also found a registry hack that allows mp4, m4v video files to show up in windows media player. I know you are a Windows Media Center user; I found out that you could stream mp4 files to XboX & also the Linksys media extender with this codec and Hack. Keep up the good work Kevin, and don’t let the trolls discourage you.
Thanks,
Joshua A. Hall
Kevin, I wasn’t saying that you are somehow promoting QT player. What I’m saying is that the QT player for Windows is so gimped and screwed up that it does not give an accurate impression of the h.264 video playback capabilities of the two UMPCs.
During CES, I made a video of Q1UP playing 6Mbps WM9 and 10Mbps h.264 720p files (you can find it by searching for my handle in Youtube). They played MUCH smoother than your demo of that 6Mbps h.264 720p trailer. The WM9 file played without dropping a single frame, and the h.264 file played pretty much at proper 24fps only dropping frames when bitrate spiked over 10Mbps.
Samsung’s official nomenclature (that’s a word I learnt as a GIJoe!) is Q1UP-XP for Samwise.
(I know! They’ve made it very confusing by using Q1 followed by a bunch of letters for every model they’ve released! Can I buy a vowel please, Pat?)
I won’t disagree that Samwise is an upgrade. It is, especially in comparison to Sam I. But I still say we’re seeing incremental changes. That means, in other words, that this is UMPC version 1.2. (Not that anybody else has released a 2.0 version yet, either.)
Oh! And if everyone knows that Vista is a dog without 2 GB of RAM, then we all know Samsung will be upping the RAM DIMM to a 2 gigger when they release the Q1UP-V model, right? Ri-i-i-i-i-ight!
(That last was sarcasm!)
Woadan
(In full curmudgeon mode)
Shogmaster, completely understand. About a year ago on our site, I was showing HD playback via WMC on the Q1P and it was much better. I was attempting to use a chipset challenging scenario to explain the difference in the two UMPCs. It shows a huge difference. Playing an HD file that worked well on both machines by using a different codec or player wouldn’t have shown that difference, it would have shown something else entirely. Not saying it wouldn’t have been useful, but it would have a different intended purpose. I do appreciate your info though, as some folks might not realize there are more efficient and enjoyable ways to watch video.
Woadan, no it doesn’t meet our ‘ideal’ view of what a UMPC should be, but of course, that’s a moving target based on who you ask. There are key feature and component upgrades that made this device worth breaking my gadget piggy bank for.
Kevin, I’m actually mostly green with envy. If I was working instead of staying in may jammies most of the day, I might be buying one, too!
May I live vicariously through you?
Woadan