TZ and HD video playback

Hi there. I am looking to get either a TZ21WN or TZ31WN (UK models) and am wondering whether they are capable of smooth,stutter-free 720p playback?

Many thanks!

 

yes they are!

 

But what would your 720p source be? The TZ doesn't have HD inputs, nor does it have a Blueray drive. Perhaps I am misunderstanding.

 

I tried a 1080i dl'ed video the other day with not so good results... so I dunno. I have a wiped-clean tz190n btw.

 

You shouldn't have any problems. I watch HD flash at 720P and its watchable. There is some stagger occasionally. I've found unless you have dedicated video ram (not on board shared) it makes a difference.

To answer voipben's question, you dont need to have HD inputs or a blu-ray drive. You can stream a lot of flash in HD these days:
http://www.adobe.com/products/hdvideo/hdgallery/

Or like thelead said, you can download it as a file that has been encoded in HD resolutions. The bottleneck in this situation is definitely the video RAM for the TZ if you have 2gb of RAM and an SSD hard drive.

 

Yeah, that just occurred to me when I saw thelead's reply! I have in fact streamed HD videos from a couple of sites and didn't have any issues. Not sure if the format was 720p or 1080i, though.

Benjamin

 

Thanks guys. I wasnt sure as various reviews had differing reports- some claimed dropped frames whilst others said 720p playback was perfect. I am guessing that maybe the difference may be whether they are using 1gb or 2gb machines?

 

reporting back... i tried some 720p videos and they worked flawlessly.

I didn't try 1080i again though.

Hope that helps.

 

Are you on vista or XP? Also in XP the systems says there is 64MB for video, not the 224 shared. Is it in fact shared and there is a reading issue or is it not shared at all?

 

I'm using vista

 

What source are you guys using to test? For me, quicktime HD trailers tend to stutter at 720p and above. I'm going to test again, maybe I just prefer choosing 480p so I don't have to wait for a huge download.

OK, just tried the following on TZ190:

Hulu HD Gallery - Stutter window, stutter at full screen.
Quicktime HD Trailers:
480p - Smooth
720p - Stutter Windowed and FS
1080p - Stutter Windowed and FS

If you guys can do this with no playback issues, what can I check on my system to see why? I'm running Vista with SP1.

 

TechMoments, have you tried using VLC rather than Quicktime. I've always tried to stay away from Quicktime on my pc's (on my MBP its ok as its OSX optimised) as its own overheads can be amazingly resource hungry. VLC is more streamlined and may give the little TZ a fighting chance.

 

On my VGN-TZ17GN, I play 720p with Media Player Classic. Smooth, no lagging sound nor video. I'm running both XP and Vista.

 

resolution means nothing.
It's really all about the bitrate it's encoded at (i.e. the quality), but also what codec it's encoded at. Most HD videos are encoded in h264 in either .avi or .mkv container, whiel the rest would just be divx or xvid (which is quite rare though).

If you want to play h264 vids smoothly, buy CoreAVC; it's a video codec for only h264 that works better than any other codec for h264 out there, and uses up significantly less cpu than others. Even on my T270, which has a by far worse cpu and HDD and ram than you guys with your TZ's (lucky =[ though I sacrificed getting a TZ95 or w/e to get a custom SZ with x9000 and 64gb SSD), and with CoreAVC, I can play HD movies perfectly fine.
I have tons of movies all encoded in h264 .mkv container in both 720p and 1080p, ranging from 4gb a movie to 9gb a movie (however 300 is a 16gb movie; the only one though), and everything plays smoooooothly, provided im not multitasking heavily.

With CoreAVC, you guys can probably run like, 5 diff cpu eating programs at once and still run them fine. (btw, i fullscreen all my movies on my T270, and works perfectly fine); You can find it for about, 8 bucks or so? And it works wonders.

Really a small price to pay to watch HQ movies on such a beautiful and sharp screen.

Edit: Also, I use Media Player Classic. It's been tested to use less CPU than pretty much any other video player. Also there's alot more customization options, which is good (you can also stretch your video so it's good if you wanna make things truely full screen). MPC combined with CoreAVC is basically the best combo you can get. Trust me guys, you'll be able to run 16gb movies fine with it.

HOWEVER, CoreAVC is only a h264 codec; if by chance you stumble onto a video with a very high bitrate encoded at xvid or divx, well all i can say is good luck. It would probably be fine, give or take it'd skip a few frames (i have a music video that's in true HD in divx; 1920x1080, 350mb, only a minute and 30 seconds, and it plays fine SOMETIMES, although every now and then, it'll get abit jumpy; i.e. skip frames, but even when it skips frames, everything's still in-sync and doesn't lag afterwards, and this is all on my t270p! TZ's would do fine I'm assuming)