DivX 720p HD playback on an old 1 ghz P3

Laurence wrote on 11/28/2006, 7:34 PM
I was rendering some video today when a friend came over. I ended up showing him some Stage6 DivX stuff on an old 1 ghz P3 laptop that we have. I couldn't believe it when I showed him some streaming 720p HD. The P3 played it back beautifully. Not only that but it didn't bog the system down at all. I could still switch windows and move around the Internet as easily as if I was playing an mp3. This particular laptop is kind of a dog as well. It's a Toshiba Satellite model that has a pretty bad problem where when you push it at all, it overheats and scales the cpu way back.

Anyway, the point is that DivX HD playback is orders of magnitude more CPU friendly then the Apple or Windows versions of the mp4 codec. I knew that before today, but I didn't realize just how much difference there actually is. The fact that it can play back so smoothly and beautifully on a slow PIII just amazes me!

Comments

jrazz wrote on 11/28/2006, 9:33 PM
Laurence, I do believe your last several threads have made your point: Divx=Good. :)

I went a head and downloaded it and after I get some free time I will try out a few things with it. I looked at your references on stage 6 (your vid and the guitar player) and it does look way better than youtube or google video. I also added a page to my website that shows a divx video and was able to get the 19 dollar deal for free from Divx b/c of it. Hopefully I will be able to try it out sooner than later.

Anyways, you might want to point divx to your last few threads and maybe they might give you some free stuff for all the free marketing you are doing for them :)

j razz
Laurence wrote on 11/28/2006, 10:02 PM
I'll be checking your site.

Maybe I am going overboard a little. I'm just so darned impressed lately. That whole "HD on an old P3" thing really blew my mind today.

Part of me is hoping that someone will turn me on to a compression scheme that is even better though. To impress me now a codec has to be able to stream HD over mid speed DSL and play back smoothly on a PIII! Not an easy task.

For the longest time I couldn't compress to DivX. Maybe that is why I'm such a late convert and why so few Vegas people seem to be joining me. Even now I have to do it in two steps:

1/ Render as an AVI encoding the video portion to DivX and the audio portion to uncompressed 16 bit 48k audio.
2/ Encode the audio to mp3 in VirtualDub using the free "Lame" mp3 encoder and the video in direct stream copy mode.

Every time I try to do both at once in Vegas I get an error. To be fair, I seem to get this error any time I try to encode using a high bit rate mp3 codec no matter what video compressor I use.
Grazie wrote on 11/28/2006, 10:14 PM
Laurence, don't listen to him ( lol!! ). I too, and for TOO long, have reacted to my own shabby attempts at encoding and thought, hey it's me, I'm being dumb. But hearing from others and what they go through but now having it countered with your enthusiasm for EVEN better and straightforward encoding, PLUS more solutions are being unearthed weekly, it appears to me that this side of the industry is cranking up its profile.

Having just jumped through several Windows Encoder "hoops", ease and quality is very high on my encoding agenda. We spend ENOUGH time on creating this stuff/content, we should therefore also have the easiest, simplest methods of squashing it too AND have the highest quality available.

Laurence! More power to yer elbow - mate!!

zcus wrote on 11/28/2006, 10:14 PM
Sony should buy up DivX - do things with it
jrazz wrote on 11/29/2006, 5:47 AM
Laurence,

It is on a page that is not linked to my home page. It is just a sample that was available for download of some guy speaking from a balcony. I was impressed though with the quality and I look foward to playing with the encoder.

j razz
bakerja wrote on 11/29/2006, 8:57 AM
In case you have not seen this open source product, Xvid is worth exploring as well.

http://www.xvid.org

JAB
Laurence wrote on 11/29/2006, 9:46 AM
I just downloaded and installed it yesterday. I haven't tried any renders with it yet.