Video playback
Video playback
With the luxury of utilizing an NVIDIA GPU you can now also use it for High-Definition content playback.
What you want to do is decode, accelerate and post process your content as much as you can over the energy efficient GPU, not the CPU which consumes much more power.
For this test we use a 1080p .mkv file. The x.264 format is often synonymous with Matroska MKV, a media file container which often embeds that x.264 content, a much admired container format for media files. In particular, the 1920x1080p movies often have some form of h.264 encoding dropped within the x.264 format. As a result, you'll need a very beefy PC with a powerful processor to be able to play back such movies, error free without frames dropping and nasty stuttering as PowerDVD or other PureVideo HD supporting software by itself will not support it. Any popular file-format (XVID/DIVX/MPEG2/MPEG4/h.264/MKV/VC1/AVC) movie can be played on this little piece of software, without the need to install codecs and filters, and where it can, it will let DXVA enable the playback. DXVA is short for DirectX Video Acceleration, and as you can tell from those four words alone, it'll try wherever it can to accelerate content over the GPU, offloading the CPU. Which is what we are after.
Our choice in software, the application 'Media Player Classic' has several advantages, as not only does it try to enable DXVA where possible through the video processor, it can also utilize the shader processors of your graphics cards and use them to post-process content.
A lot of shaders (small pieces of pixel shader code) can be executed within the GPU to enhance the image quality.
Media Player Classic HT edition has this feature built in, you can even select several shaders like image sharpening and de-interlacing... combine them and thus run multiple shaders (enhancements) simultaneously. Fantastic features for high quality content playback.
Download Media Player Classic HC (this is actually free public domain software).
The GPU is doing all the work, as you can see, the h.264 content within the x.264 file container is not even a tiny bit accelerated over the CPU. Read more about this feature right here in this article.
Alternatively you can also install CoreAVC to utilize that GPU as it has CUDA support these days.
As you can see, overall you want your content to be run over the GT 335M GPU. Your battery will last you more than three hours this way.
