How come you need a somewhat fast computer to watch HD movies?

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BobSacamento

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#1 BobSacamento
Member since 2003 • 4340 Posts

Like whenever I get one off of IGN or Gametrailers or something, it wont run properly. It even says that you need a fast computer to watch HD Movies.

 

Mines nowhere near fast, but it's a video - thats what i dont get?

 

Doesnt it just play it like a DVD? It doesnt have to render the graphics or anything, so why do they require such good hardware? Then you can pop in a DVD and it plays it perfectly?

 

btw the specs are: Pentium 4 @ 1.4 ghz
                           512 MB Ram
                           Radeon 9600xt
                        

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DeeJayInphinity

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#2 DeeJayInphinity
Member since 2004 • 13415 Posts
It's very RAM intensive. It also gives the HDD a good workout. The PC has to process the high-quality video @ 29.9 frames a second so that's why it takes a lot.
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My_name_a_Borat

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#3 My_name_a_Borat
Member since 2007 • 762 Posts

It really depends on what format you're viewing.

For example, 720p WMV-HD video, even at a full 10mbps bitrate, plays just fine on my 1.13GHz Pentium 3 machine. Divx-HD also plays fine on this machine.

But Quicktime HD is a totally different story. The machine above drops all sorts of frames playing 720p Quicktime media. You basically need a dual core to play the 1080p Quicktime video, while a single core 2.8GHz P4 would easily handle 1080p in the WMV-HD format.

DVDs are of much lower image resolution, and use the much easier to process MPEG2 format. Any computer will play a DVD, even my old 333MHz P2 rig. HD is of much higher resolution and image quality, and often uses a harder to process codec such as VC-1 (wmv-hd, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray) or H.264 (quicktime, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray).

Edit- just noticed that you're using a 1.4GHz P4. Those first-gen P4s weren't all the great and definitely would have a hard time with HD video. The late-model P3s were quite a bit quicker, even though they had lower clockspeeds. The 1.13GHz P3 I mentioned above plays back high bitrate (10mbps) 720p WMV-HD at around 90% CPU utilization. It wouldn't surprise me that a first-gen P4 1.4 hits the 100% mark and has to drop frames so that the video keeps up with the audio.

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Macolele

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#4 Macolele
Member since 2006 • 534 Posts
My PC Athlon 2500+ 512MB Geforce 6600 play 720p well. But 1080p is impossible.
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Kodai_kun

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#5 Kodai_kun
Member since 2005 • 1413 Posts

1080 anything, you need dual-core, or one of the new video cards with onboard processing of MPEG-4

It actually takes a lot of horses to decompress and display 2 million pixels (DVD-350,000)

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Hiryuu_

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#6 Hiryuu_
Member since 2006 • 2521 Posts
For old PCs, just get CoreAVC and you can play anything.. It's not free though... but you can get it free. ;]