A new use for a netbook….playing HD video?
By Jonathan Preston. Filed in Uncategorized |
You’re probably read the title of this article and thought “he’s nuts”. After all, a netbook is supposed to be a very lightweight (both physically and in terms of processing capability) and portable system. Equipped with single-core processors ranging in speed from 700MHz to 1.6GHz, how could a netbook possibly handle playing HD videos?
The answer is hardware video acceleration. For years, we’ve seen this technology around — when DVD drives started to appear in computers, the processors of the time couldn’t handle doing all the MPEG-2 video decoding in software. The solution was dedicated hardware capable of decoding and displaying the DVD video. It was expensive, but in time, it found its way into most video cards.
Since that time, we’ve gone from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4. MPEG-4 exists largely in two flavors. MPEG-4 Part 2 (also known as the Advanced Simple Profile, or ASP) is implemented by a variety of codecs, most notably DivX and XviD. While never included as part of a disc-based video standard, this attained great popularity in the world of computers, becoming the de-facto format for storing and sharing video on a computer. MPEG-4 Part 10 (also called Advanced Video Coding, or AVC) is most commonly known as H.264, and is used on Bly-Ray discs, YouTube and Hulu, among others.
These codecs are well-known for their ability to provide similar quality to codecs like MPEG-2, but with much smaller filesizes, due to additional optimizations in encoding architecture. Because of these optimizations, the H.264 files take a lot more processing power to decode than MPEG-2, which puts us back in the same situation we faced with DVDs — playback on low-end machines, like netbooks, just isn’t feasible in software.
Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem — a new generation of hardware video accelerators. New classes of hardware video accelerators are capable of decoding not only MPEG-2, but also various forms of MPEG-4. Many recently released graphics cards from AMD and nVidia include this hardware for desktop platforms, but this still left HD video out of reach of netbooks, until now.
Intel has released its Poulsbo ultra-mobile chipset. Poulsbo includes the GMA500 video core (also known as Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX), which has full H.264 hardware acceleration. This chipset is featured in a variety of netbooks, including my Acer AspireOne AO751h. This model has an 11.6″ HD screen (1366×768 pixels specifically). Although my AO751h only has a 1.3GHz CPU, I don’t have any significant problems displaying HD video on this tiny lightweight system.
If you’re running Windows, in theory the drivers and other necessary software came pre-installed with your system. I found, however, that the performance was not good in Windows. Being a Linux guy, however, this doesn’t really bother me. Unfortunately, Intel hasn’t been all that supportive of the Linux community. So, as usual, we’ll have to do the setup ourselves. I’m using an install of Kubuntu 9.10 for this.
- To get the Poulsbo graphics running properly in 2D and 3D, we need to install the proper packages. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu repositories don’t yet contain the updated versions, so we’ll need newer packages. Open a shell (in Kubuntu, press Alt+F2, type Konsole and press Enter). Download and execute a script that will get these packages by running this command in the shell:
wget http://gma500re.altervista.org/scripts/poulsbo_ppa.sh && sh ./poulsbo_ppa.sh - Reboot your system. It should load up in your correct full screen resolution.
- Install the VA API library and compile MPlayer from source by following some of the instructions at http://linux-tipps.blogspot.com/2009/12/vaapi-accelerated-hd-video-on-msi-wind.html . Follow instructions 5 and 6 to set up VA API. Then skip to the section on compiling MPlayer from source and follow instructions to compile and install MPlayer.
- Download an HD trailer and test the player. Remember to instruct MPlayer to use your hardware by running a command like this:
mplayer -fs -vo vaapi -va vaapi /path/to/file.mp4
And that’s it! You can now enjoy 1080p HD videos on your netbook. (It’s also very cool to watch the CPU use meter stay at under 30% on a netbook while decoding HD video.)
As a side note — you can actually run two instances of MPlayer and decode two HD videos at the same time without a problem, but you’ll experience issues if you try to render the output at full screen.
One final detail is this — the video acceleration is not compatible with suspend functionality yet. If you try to launch a VA API accelerated video player after resuming from a suspend, your system will completely crash, and will require a reboot.
