Blu-ray In Laptops Could Be Hard On Batteries 202
damienhunter notes a Wired story on the power-hungry ways of the first generation of Blu-ray players coming soon to a laptop near you. "With the Sony-backed HD format emerging victorious from a two-year showdown with Toshiba's HD DVD, many laptop manufacturers are now scrambling to add Blu-ray drives in their desktop and notebook lineups. Next month, Dell will even introduce a sub-$1,000 Blu-ray notebook... But the promise of viewing an increasing variety of HD movies on your laptop may be overshadowed by ongoing concerns over the technology's vampiric effect on battery life. Indeed, if the first generation of Blu-ray equipped laptops are any indication, you might not get more than halfway through that movie before running out of juice completely, analysts say."
Is it the CPU power needed for the DRM? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is it the CPU power needed for the DRM? (Score:5, Insightful)
Decoding 20+ Mbps of MPEG-2 or VC-1 video along with lossless, compressed audio on the fly is extremely taxing and uses a lot of power.
Re:Is it the CPU power needed for the DRM? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure how the interactivity features compare in terms of additional processor loads, but this could cause differences between the formats also.
Whilst I understand the power required to render HD content I think we must also bear in mind we're looking at 20gb - 30gb of data that needs to be decrypted, that can't be easy on the hardware either surely?
I don't know if there's anything fancy they can do to lower the load, but even if there is dedicated hardware in the drive to offload this from the processor the dedicated hardware is still going to need some power.
It'd be nice to see what proportion of resources are required for AACS, BD+, Java for Bluray discs and the data decoding and rendering itself. Anyone any ideas on this?
Re:Is it the CPU power needed for the DRM? (Score:5, Insightful)
From a recent anandtech review (http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3246&p=2):
"The Mobile GM45/47 chipsets are an integral part of Montevina and will feature the new GMA X4500HD graphics core. The X4500HD will add full hardware H.264 decode acceleration, so Apple could begin shipping MacBook Pros with Blu-ray drives after the Montevina upgrade without them being a futile addition. With full hardware H.264 decode acceleration your CPU would be somewhere in the 0 - 10% range of utilization while watching a high definition movie, allowing you to watch a 1080p movie while on battery power . The new graphics core will also add integrated HDMI and DisplayPort support."
However, there is going to have to be some sacrifice on the user experience. I mean you can't really expect to watch 30-40gb of data in 2 hours and expect battery life not to take a hit. What would be ideal is if a single blu-ray discs had both an H.264 and a lower quality MPEG-2/mpeg-4 version of the video. If I am watching on a laptop screen (hooking the laptop to a HDTV would be another story), I don't really need to see 1080p resolution.
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What would be ideal is if a single blu-ray discs had both an H.264 and a lower quality MPEG-2/mpeg-4 version of the video. If I am watching on a laptop screen (hooking the laptop to a HDTV would be another story), I don't really need to see 1080p resolution.
Maybe someone can invent a disc with less capacity that stores lower quality video?
Sarcasm aside, I agree there really is no need to see 1080p on a laptop screen. I really question why anyone would want to do that, but I suppose it beats the heck out of buying two different formats of the same movie.
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Okay, I am sure that did not make a lot of sense. Sorry.
Now, we probably could put in hardware the a
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In the early days of DVDs, I had some 450Mhz machine which was unable to play DVDs without stuttering, but was perfectly able to play the same mpeg2-File without encryption with no problems. And not everything on the DVD is encrpyted, precisely because of the (at this time very high) demand on cpu.
Captain Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
o rly? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:o rly? (Score:4, Interesting)
Scaling not expensive (Score:2)
1080i is really 1920 x 1080 - while it's not quite common yet laptops shipping with higher resolution screens have been supporting that resolution (or a bit more).
Scaling though is a pretty lightweight effort for the system, especially compared to the decoding. You'd always have the i
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The HDTV spec calls for a
You need 1080 (Score:2)
Actually 1080p on a 42" TV is pretty amazing - you can definitely see the difference between 720 and 1080 at 42". Right now about half of the 42" TVs I've been shopping for are 1080p. Go see it at a TV store where the staff are sufficiently not-dim-witted and actually connect all the HD TVs to HD sources.
1024-line laptops are common enough, but to display a wider picture than 4:3 aspect ratio you'll need to downsize the picture to 700 or even les
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Don't worry dude. Panty Party 29 and Girls Gone Wild in Lower Mongolia 14 are coming to Blu-ray soon.
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i am alittle to lazy to do the math for you
now if your laptop has a higher pixel density than your TV the image should look better on your laptop than the tv..
it is all about perception and depth.. personaly i prefer that when i am watching
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My laptop screen resolution is 1280x800. 720p resolution is 1280x720.
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Because you bought the BluRay edition of the movie to be able to watch it at home on your 42" plasma TV?
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Well, the better solution would be to do it the HD-DVD way. Put both the Blu-Ray and the DVD versions on one disc! The technology has been demonstrated, so it's doable.
Of course, there is managed copy, but I don't see how that's supposed to work until Blu-Ray 2.0 players come out later this year able to do key negotiations and license
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This is the same 15 inch screen people read emails off of. I don't have the best vision in the world, yet I still find your question baffling.
Re:o rly? (Score:5, Funny)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
It's not the drive that's really the problem (Score:2)
What probably will start happening is some hardware acceleration of the process. The newer models of the nVidia 8800 series support hardware acceleration of the HD codecs and it apparently take a bunch of load off the CPU. Something
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The thing that would help most is to rip the movie to a resolution more compatible with your laptop... I know of very few laptops that can display 1920x1080 video in it's proper resolution... convert it to 720p, something with fewer pixels. It'll make the decoding easier, the file smaller, and look better on your smaller screen anyway.
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Further, the next step of the
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Not really a "Blu-Ray" issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Better batteries? (Score:5, Funny)
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And DVD doesn't???? (Score:2)
Even when my battery was new, I still wouldn't get more than 3/4 of the way through a DVD before having to plug in.
Low end laptops never could play through a complete movie, regardless of whether it was on DVD or Blu Ray.
It doesn't matter how much power Blu Ray consumes - there will always be a laptop manufacturer who skimps on the battery to cut costs. If you want to watch movies on a portable device, you have to buy a personal media player. Sad, but true.
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I bought a mid-level laptop with the big battery because I'm not stupid.
I didn't buy the blu-ray drive because it was $360.
I can run my lappy on full brightness and wifi for over 3 hours.
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I carry a couple DVDs around with me to watch, but I have a folder on my HD with several dozen video clips for entertainment on the road. Considering my HD is 200gb, (about par by today's standards for
As far as I can see not a "Blue Ray" problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
TGIF (Score:2)
heh.
And melted discs, no doubt... (Score:4, Insightful)
If the laser in a Blu-ray drive uses remotely as much as your CPU or LCD backlight, you're going to be burning a hole through your laptop in just a few minutes... Where does the media go to always find these moronic analysts?
Does anyone know? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Reading does require less power than writing, but the power requirements are also related to read speed. So the laser on a 12x DVD reader needs to be higher power than one on a 1x DVD reader. Similar for Blu-ray.
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I agree - that's a misleading and idiotic quote from the analyst.
Older 1GHz laptop CPUs use about 10W, while newer CPUs that you would probably want for higher end graphics capability are 30W or more (that's only the CPU not counting the GPU). A laser diode is about 5mW for reading a
Say it isn't so... (Score:4, Insightful)
CD-ROM then CD-RW then DVD then DVD-RW/RAM and now BR... each step started with high power requirements and weren't suited for mobile use. And almost every one of them was met with this kind of fud. After evolution of the technology we seem to be surviving just fine with our current optical medium.
It's just going to take a few revs. of hardware improvements.
As for HD Video playback... well, that's another problem - just the shear size of data needed to be decrypted and decoded... ouch.
Was HD-DVD substantially different? (Score:2, Interesting)
Already answered above. (Score:2)
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720-1080P MKVs don't have this problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I used "Media Player Classic" with latest K-lite codecs, using the just the stock battery and a medium power saving mode and everthing went fine for the entire movie.
Yes, playing this files may not be legal but I just don't see a better or legal way to do HD with my current hardware.
Same thing happens if you try to play a Blu-ray movie (Assuming you have a drive) with Linux.
Um; bullshit? (Score:2)
ony DVD and HDDVD
the director was in the news quite a bit, heavily opposed to this decision by the studio
transformers still is unavailable on blu-ray- althought that is expected to change.
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300 was the blu-ray ripped one.
Frankly until I get a player I will just call them HD movies or MKVs since they are all just data in my HDD.
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Usual story (Score:5, Insightful)
I freely admit that I absolutely do not "get" the HD fuss. It's the same thing we've had for years, with more pixels, that you can't reasonably see on a fair test past a certain distance (although I would say that on a high-res laptop you are more likely to spot the difference because of the unusually close eye-screen distance), with new storage formats, new compression, new software, new DRM and new performance characteristics... which are killing battery life. And, yes, eventually they'll start making "blu-ray acceleration cards" just like MPEG-acceleration, 3D-acceleration, etc., although in this day and age they're called "software on the GPU". But at the end of the day, you've gained little (a higher res that you might not be able to distinguish) for enormous performance increases.
Where's the advantage in it when a "Blu-ray" PC can still play the DVD's of previous years but at much, much less expense... if you can play a blu-ray for two hours or you can play MPEG-2 for six (while compiling stuff in the background without jerkiness) on the same machine, what are you going to end up using if you watch a lot of video on your laptop?
When I go away and know that I might want to view movies on my laptop (e.g. long trip staying in cheap hotels, stay over at a friends house etc), I take either DVD's, or I have a bunch of MPG's/AVI's/VOB's etc. on the laptop itself or on DVD-R's ahead of time. Quality isn't really the factor there and the advantage to having everything in a simple format that everyone can read easily and which doesn't tax the laptop is key.
It's another case of "laptop = general purpose computer, so let's turn it into a media centre and make it do everything". It's nice that it's CAPABLE of everything but you can't expect a portable device to do it all AND give you good performance at everything. Laptops are not even desktop-substitutes for most work (the times I have to explain this to people... it costs pounds to repair a broken desktop, hundreds to repair a broken laptop).
Let the early adopters waste their money. Even if Blu-Ray becomes the de-facto standard, I'd much rather just decrypt-to-disk and convert to a format that's easily readable, with extremely cheap media, that plays the video "good enough" for most things if I'm intending to carry it around with me. Much better 1 x DVD-R with a couple of full movies on it that I can watch one-after-the-other and make a backup copy for pennies than 1 x Blu-Ray that I can't give my friends with only a single movie on it that kills my batteries just watching it.
There was a time when I did exactly the same with DVD vs VCD - it's actually trivial to just copy several DVD's worth of movie/tv show to a DVD-R or even a CD-R and not worry about the quality. You're travelling - who cares whether it's HD or VCD-quality so long as you can tell what's going on without eyestrain?
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Nonsense. MP2 was far less CPU intensive, while compressing about 33% poorer than MP3. Not a huge difference.
An arguement that would have been twice as appropriate to make when DVDs
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Nonsense. MP2 was far less CPU intensive, while compressing about 33% poorer than MP3. Not a huge difference.
Many people can't hear the difference between mp3 and a cd, but anyone can hear the difference between an mp2 and an mp3. A much lower-bitrate mp3 is listenable when compared to an mp2.
I had a lot of basis for comparison back in the day, I spent a day at IUMA mangling files for them (if I knew then what I know now I could have done it with a shell script in minutes) and browsing around their site - when they were just making the mp2 to mp3 transition.
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Not true at all. MP2 does need a higher bitrate, but not by too much (as I said, an MP3 can be about 33% smaller). And this is true today with GOOD MP3 encoders, while the difference was even less significant at the time.
I can't possibly guess the specific difference you saw, but it's certainly not typical, and does not reflect on the format.
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Only enough battery for half a movie, huh... (Score:5, Funny)
Blu-Ray: making crappy old movies only half as crappy.
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This is the second time this week I've noticed someone moan about their overuse of Latter Day Saints. What the feck is going on? Has the overuse of Lysergic Software Distribution clouded your mind?
Huh? (Score:3, Funny)
Blue-ray is like Viagra?
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Battery life sucks on multimedia laptops anyway (Score:2, Insightful)
(Oh, and I have a good music and video collection stored locally on the laptop)
whats the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
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This comment only makes sense if you sit as far away from your laptop as you would from the 32" screen, or at least far enough away that the 19" screen occupies less of your visual field than the 32" screen would at the distance you typically view it.
That seems rather unlikely, unless you typically sit unusually close to your 32" screen or use your laptop from an unusually great distance.
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Could be? (Score:2)
Blu-Ray uses shorter wavelength...more power? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Problem solved.. (Score:5, Informative)
Except the main consumer of power is maxing out the CPU to do the highdef H.264 decoding in real time.
Words cannot adequately describe how idiotic that statement is... Divx is MPEG-4 ASP, much older and less advanced than H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is the primary codec used to encode highdef discs.
How in the world you're expecting to use an OLD codec to reencode a video stored in a NEW codec, to reduce the file-size of a video by a factor of 5, while NOT losing HUGE amounts of picture quality, is vastly beyond my comprehension.
Re:Problem solved.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The big space-saver (and CPU as well) is resizing that 1920x1080 stream down to a more reasonable (and closer to your average laptop resolutions) of 1280x720.
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Perhaps for sufficiently low values of acceptable.
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1280x720? I'm willing to accept that some laptops have that resolution display, but who else wants that resolution? I want 420p/i, 720p/i or 1080p/i resolution. Why would I ever want anything else? I have nothing at that resolution (laptops in this house are 1680x1050, 1600x1200, and 1024x768; my external flat panel is 1280x1024.) I would a million times rather have the 1366x768 of 720i/p, because systems are optimized to handle common resolutions, and I might actually see an output device that resolution w
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Re:Problem solved.. (Score:5, Informative)
I happen to be a professional, and I know of NO such codecs. Not one.
DRM, metadata, and streaming are completely and totally independent of the underlying video and audio codecs.
Some people are very happy with vinyl records. Some people are legally blind. That does not change the facts.
I will ignore the rest of your purely trolling comment.
Re:Problem solved.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia is not a dictionary. And one vastly over-simplified summary explanation does not change the definition.
Re:Problem solved.. (Score:5, Informative)
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Quicktime is a multimedia player and encoder program, just like Windows Media Player or Real.
The file format is MOV (and MP4, a subset of MOV).
The most recent video codec is H.264
The most recent audio codec is AAC.
Of course it has used many other video and audio codecs over the years.
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This problem is not limited to illuminating the laser.
Re:Problem solved.. (Score:4, Informative)
Case in point, I have a couple of projects I've done with DVD footage. The DivX/XviD version comes to about 95mb. The exact same thing encoded in h.264 at the exact same quality (720x480) clocks in at about 45mb. If I kept the same filesize, I could scale it up to 1280x720 easily (would look like ass since the source isn't that high to begin with, but you see the point). There is no way you could take a high-def movie and compress it to 8gb in DivX without sacrificing quality.
The only win you're going to get with this route is saving power due to decreased CPU usage. Rendering h.264 video in realtime is notoriously taxing on CPU's, ESPECIALLY at HD resolutions. But if you drop the quality, you lose the entire point of having a high-def copy in the first place.
And to the people talking about the lasers eating up power, yes they do. To an extent. Along with maxing out the CPU, the biggest drain on the battery is the drive itself. It's a moving part. It spins. ANY optical drive when in constant use is going to drain the battery a lot faster than just sitting idle or reading a few files every couple of minutes.
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Re:Problem solved.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because so-called "high-def" is really "high-res" video?
Everyone is claiming that downloading will kill Blu-Ray. It won't for at least the near future. IF we take even the most common Blu-Ray format around (single layer 25GB), you cannot compress it into DivX without losing a lot. Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) these days use more advanced codecs than DivX (h.264 or VC-1). H.264 is known formally as MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding), while DivX is known as MPEG-4 ASP (Advanced Simple Profile). DivX is much better than MPEG2, but isn't a contender at all when compared to AVC.
Until one can download 25GB easily, most "high def" is around 720p. Sure that's "good enough" for most people, except it's also horribly overcompressed. Even comparisons of various downloaded "HD" videos show slight improvements against the standard-def version, but were clearly inferior to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD and even Cable. One review even said "save your money and just download the standard def version".
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Duel format HD-DVDs could.
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Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
I did a battery test. Not quite the same as watching realtime video, but I assume that pegging both my cores to 100% with the screen at 75% brightness while WRITING a DVD (at 1X just to make sure it took at least 2 hours) uses quite similar power to watching a BD or DVDVD movie, if not far more.
My battery died at 1 hour 50 minutes. Feature length for "most" movies nowadays. Playing a 1080P rip of a movie from the HDD I've gotten over 2.5 hours before, but I typically use lower brightness and don't use DVD at the same time. My wife's poor machine however, playing just simple DVDs, she gets about 1 hour 20 minutes. playing games online she gets less than an hour if she forgets to plug in.
Then again, the only places I watch a DVD is 1) in my car, where i have a power agapter, at home at my desk, or at work on breaks. I'm never out in a park wathcing DVD. At a coffee shop, there's an outlet handy if I need it.
This Vista POS I have from work supposedly has a centrino duo, which uses less watts than any of my other systems by a large margin, but since Vista thrashes the HDD so much, it only gets about 90 minutes on a charge. When XP was on it, I got nearly 3 hours per charge. Since BD and HD can only play under Vista anyway (unless you convert and rip to HDD) I'd say Vista itself was a bigger battery hog than the DVD player...
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Laptop screens are also much closer to your eyeballs in normal use than typical living-room TV distance. The useful resolution (that is, the resolution that isn't wasted because you can't make out the detail) of a laptop screen is probably at least as great as the typical living room HDTV.