Video Quality Reviews
I just discovered an article on Tom’s Hardware that compares the NVidia vs ATI (AMD) video decode quality . Unfortunately although it was just back in January its based on the previous generation GPUs so the results are fairly obsolete already. Hopefully they will update it soon for the new GPUs.
I took some video with my Canon TX1 flying back from Bend yesterday and have seen an interesting implication of the advances in video technology- when I shoot with the 720p (highest quality) video settings I can’t play it back on any of my computers without dropping frames. So this stuff does matter.
Another aspect is that the configuration of how all this video stuff works together on a given machine is a total mess. There are all these different encoding formats and codecs and its almost impossible to tell which is being used where. I’d love to discover a good utility that lets me easily-
1) Check a video file and tell me what it really is. What video codec, what enclosure type and what bit-rates are all the pieces.
2) Check a machine and tell me what codecs are installed and help me figure out which will be used by Windows Media Player, Media Center, etc. Also make sure that all the right “enable hardware acceleration” settings are on- as the Tom’s Hardware article points out these are sometimes disabled by default which is really strange.
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