Windows Media HD hardware requirements

Sidecar2 wrote on 8/20/2007, 2:36 PM
What does a computer need to play back Windows Media HD smoothly?

My personal 2.8 P4 plays back WMV 720p files (compressed at 6 mbps) no problem. A brand spanking new Dell Edge super duper computer/server with 15,000 rpm drives cannot play the WMV. Even the audio falls apart playing back from the Dell. It plays back 4.8 mbps files okay, but not 6 mbps.

What is the bottleneck on a given computer that stops WMV from playing back well? How do you set up a player to handle WMV HD successfully?

Faster RAM? Faster bus? Magic video card? (Mine is a pedestrian Nvidia Quadro4 580 XGL, now three years old) Newer computers with faster video cards don't seem to help.

What's the secret?

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 8/20/2007, 4:38 PM
The MY-HD 120 HDTV card plays them back perfectly as long as you change some file endings around. Even 5.1.
JJK
4eyes wrote on 8/20/2007, 5:10 PM
In Windows Media Player goto Options and under the Video section click on Advanced.
Turn off "Allow Frame Dropping".
There are other settings that can be tweaked but this one is a major setting.

Playing back hd-wmv isn't the same as playing back hd-mpeg2 or avchd(h264) video.
I can playback HD on a 2.8P4-HT fsb800 asus MB using any ATI HD Certified graphics card.
Processor usage is approx 18-22% for HD-Mpeg2@25MBS. AVCHD not to good.
Most important is to have a video card that has HighDef Hardware Accelleration and you also need a HighDef Certified software player such as PowerDvd7 enhanced/ultra.
ATI uses AVIVO for HighDef
NVidia uses PureVision
PowerDvd7 can access both the AVIVO or PureVision drivers to access the hardware capabilities of these cards.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 8/20/2007, 7:03 PM
I have an AMD XP 1800 with an ATI 9600 & an HDTV tuner. It can play back HD no problem because the tuner has a built in decoder.

I had that ATI 9600 in my AMD 64 3000 & played back HD no problem in mpeg-2 & wmv. All the way up to 1080p. Modern ATI cards (ATI 9600 & above) can accelerate WMV decoding & that helps a lot.
Sidecar2 wrote on 8/21/2007, 12:15 PM
Thank you, Mr. HappyFriar. I'll check the ATI 9600 out. Sounds like what I need. Afterall, a $30 DVD player can decode 8mbps MPEG-2 no problem because it's got a dedicated decoder chip installed.

I need something like that for a computer.