Ed "The Computer Wizard"

I recently began testing movie playback under Windows 7 and have some interesting feedback. Different players yielded different results on this HP Mini 1000’s Atom processor.

I installed VLC player to check out the playback issues I documents in my last post. I turns out that the file was to blame, as the player showed the same results at the same file locations.

For my next video, I have an .avi of Indiana Joes and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skulls. When I ripped this from the DVD, I choose some profile that made is more square, not letter boxed. That was fine, and it looked great, but it wouldn’t scale up to full screen. I was able to test this in more players though.

First I used VLC Player, it was smooth and pretty clear. That’s when I fist realized that I couldn’t get the image to go full screen. I thought maybe it was an issue with VLC, but JetAudio did the same thing. I was able to get this file to play in Windows Media Player 12. It worked fine, but the image was a little grainy.

Last, I used Windows Media Center. I have to say that this was the most resource intensive application, and was a little sluggish to get started. I saw my CPU and memory meter max out but once it started the image was crystal clear. I was sold! My replacement memory stick came in the other day, so I decided to see if that made a difference, and of course it helped. It was still a little sluggish getting started, I’m assuming that has to do with the Atom processor, but once it loaded the responsiveness of the controls was a lot better with 2GB of memory as opposed to just 1GB.

I think I will be using Windows Media center a lot more often. One thing I liked was that Media Center had an option to resume the video clip even after restarting the device. That helps a lot when you are watching a longer movie and have to split it between two or more sittings. I don’t think this laptop has an IR port, but a Media Center remote would be nice with this. My wife’s laptop (XP Media Center Edition) has a small PCMCIA card sized remote that stores in the side of the unit. Granted, that thing weighs five times as much as my mini and even she has started asking to use the mini as opposed to he 17″ Wide Screen laptop when surfing from the sofa.

Media experiments are over, now I want to shoot a few videos of some of Windows 7’s best features. Is there anything special you want to see? I have a few ideas, but will take suggestions as well.

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