[mythtvnz] More on HD WAS Pause between video files

[Steve Hodge]

On 2/10/06, Nick Rout <nick@rout.co.nz> wrote:
> More on HD with h.264. I downloaded a movie trailer (Pirates of the Carib=
bean 2 (I have a 10 year old OK????)

This plays fine (with around 25% idle) with mplayer on my Sempron
2800+ (actually an overclocked 2400+). I can't play it with QT on my
Athlon XP 2000+ desktop, but I think QT is known to suck for h.264 on
Windows.

There's a bit of confusion about video formats though. It seems that
anything 1280 pixel wide and progressive is getting called 720p. E.g.
this clip is 1280x532x24fps - letterboxed 720p24. Actual 720p HDTV
content could be as high as 1280x720x60fps (true 720p60) though - 35%
more pixels at 2.5 times the frame rate. I don't think I can play that
if it's encoded with h.264!

I have an old 1080p24 Serenity trailer that I can't play with mplayer
- it drops about 80% of the frames.

The question remains though as to what sort of spec machine could play
DVD material that's been re-encoded with h.264 (i.e. 720x576x24 + DTS
or AC3 sound). That's only about a third the number of pixels of the
Pirates trailer so obviously my MythTV machine will be fine, but I
wonder how low the CPU speed can be.

Steve