NVIDIA Ion Blu-ray Investigation: Not a problem?

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• weh - Wednesday, March 11, 2009 - link

  I read your original report before you pulled it. I thought it was very well done.
  
  While I agree that you should have noted nVidia's exception to your findings, explaining that they (and you) would continue to explore the matter in an effort to determine why your experience was so different from their claims, I do NOT think you should have pulled the article. A manufacturer certainly deserves a chance to respond to a negative review. And, should the review process be found faulty, a clarification or retraction is certainly appropriate.
  
  HOWEVER, I think your pulling the article is a cop-out and that your action reflects poorly on the journalistic integrity of your site. It calls into question the strength of your positive reviews.

• sprockkets - Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - link

  I'd rather you check to see if this works. Screw Blu-Ray playback; I want 1080p file playback instead.
  
  http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html">http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

• bogey - Wednesday, March 11, 2009 - link

  Or in Windows you need DXVA for offloading the decoding to GPU.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX_Video_Acceler...">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX_Video_Acceler...
  
  You should check if it was enabled when playing videos.
  
  I use media player classic homecinema edition in Windows XP with laptop + quadro 160. 1080p runs with very little cpu load.
  If DXVA is not enabled, cpu load raises even to 100%

• neogodless - Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - link

  I read most of the article but not the comments, and it didn't occur to me that USB could be part of the problem. I left thinking "OK if I want 1080p playback, don't get a single core Atom." Perhaps there was enough information in the article to indicate otherwise, but I didn't read it closely enough or "read into it" to get a different conclusion. So I understand the article coming down for now. If a revised testing procedure comes around, I think the article will probably be revived with those updates, and with pointing out the inadequacies in the software and/or USB connection.

• grebe925 - Wednesday, March 11, 2009 - link

  I managed to read the article before it was pulled. I personally support his position viz. using a CPU with little or no headroom even if it can perform the task at hand is a bad idea. But I did sense that Anand was heavily editorializing against using the Atom platform to do something it was not supposed to do. He should have measured his results twice, published them once and still come to the same conclusion.

• bogey - Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - link

  I wonder if DXVA was enabled when you played the movies.
  Could you try with mplayer classic homecinema edition?
  

• bogey - Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - link

  I have similiar system, not ion but NVidia 9400 based and 2.5GHz dual core.
  OS is linux and using VDPAU, cpu load is almost zero when playing any HD material. Even killa sampla plays fine.

• someonesomewhere - Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - link

  A 2.5 Atom dual core? Because, if you're talking about a big hot desktop CPU, that's not a similar system.

• bogey - Wednesday, March 11, 2009 - link

  btw, cores are running at 1200MHz, even during 1080p.

• mikesm - Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - link

  When are AMD and Nvidia going to learn that they can't depend on the bozos at Cyberlink to write code that takes full advantage of their hardware for playback? Anyone who has built an HTPC knows how disappointing the support for hardware offload is in PowerDVD and how it varies from release to release.
  
  Most of the time the CPU can pull the chestnuts out of the fire, but with ION it just plain doesn't work unless the GPU is doing all it can.