Video/DVD playback on Integrated Video Cards

I plan to get a Macbook in October once Leopard is released. Currently the Macbooks have the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950. If Macbooks are updated at the time Leopard is released, according to speculation by many people the video card--if at all is upgraded--might be upgraded to the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100. Either way both are integrated video cards. Now, I don't plan to game on this notebook but I will be watching a lot of videos on it. I download HD videos a lot & occasionally might watch a bunch of DVDs. I might even connect the notebook to a HD LCD TV supporting 720p (about 21" - 27", haven't bought it yet). Will such integrated video cards be sufficient for all these tasks or will I not get smooth video playback?
If not, I'm going to need to look into other alternatives (MBP or Dell XPS M1330).
Basic configuration of the notebook would be:
Core 2 Duo 2.00GHz processor
2GB RAM
160GB Hard Drive

 

Yes and yes. DVD's were played on laptops from 2000-2001, so don't expect any problems there. the 2GHz C2D is more than sufficient to playback 720p video (speaking from experience). Most HD videos I know of aren't hardware accelerated anyways, since you need both a videoplayer and a videoformat that supports it. A VC-1 wmv fil can be hardware accelerated if you play it back in something that supports HW-accelration of wmv files (WMP does) but a h.264 mkv file can't. Don't know if quicktime or OSX supports it.

 

Dedicated video cards help off-load the video processing from the CPU, meaning you can more easily multitask. If you're watching just the DVD and doing nothing else, the acceleration isn't critical.

 

Still, not everything is supported. So many are not likely to be accelerated anyways.

 

So I should be ok even if the integrated video card is not upgraded to X3100 by Apple in the near future, right?

 

yup .