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    Dell have a QuickPlay equivalent?

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by kmatzen, Jul 17, 2007.

  1. kmatzen

    kmatzen Notebook Consultant

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    I was wondering if Dell had an equivalent to HP's QuickPlay. Not very important at all, just curious.

    Or is that what Media Direct is? I didn't know if Media Direct was like QuickPlay or like some sort of media center you use in Windows.
     
  2. praneeth

    praneeth Sanath Jaya Suriya!!!

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    That is what Media Direct does, allows you to start up without starting windows fully and watch movies/browse pictures etc.
     
  3. xie

    xie Notebook Consultant

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    Does that increase battery life at all? I've never seen it in action.
     
  4. Greg

    Greg Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    MD uses less system resources than XP does, so I do believe that you will save some battery life. How much?...not sure.
     
  5. praneeth

    praneeth Sanath Jaya Suriya!!!

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    It has to, since you don't have a zillion Windows Vista processes running in the background. You do loose significant hard drive space for the Media Direct partition though.
     
  6. monkstah

    monkstah Notebook Consultant

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    It would be nice if Media Direct could play .avi files though. You could have codecs installed.
     
  7. xie

    xie Notebook Consultant

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    That would require it to boot to the OS to read the wrapper information (AVI is not a standard format) or to include more of a hardware solution like set-top DivX players. Not possible really.
     
  8. monkstah

    monkstah Notebook Consultant

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    Really? It's possible, because Media Direct plays .WMV files
     
  9. xie

    xie Notebook Consultant

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    .WMV is not a wrapper like AVI. It's a single, standard format published by Microsoft.
     
  10. monkstah

    monkstah Notebook Consultant

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    True, but There are certain codecs that it could play then, like the DivX standard for .avi
     
  11. xie

    xie Notebook Consultant

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    DivX has all sorts of licensing fees to be certified, and is such a niche market. It'd be nice, but the intention and probably 99% of its use is DVDs.

    I wouldn't ever use it, but I could see why it would be cool. You could see if you could hack it in somehow with Google, or convert stuff to WMV.