Watching HD movies on Asus UL20A

INFO! I don't have this notebook anymore. It was given away but I heard it's still working pretty much ok.

Today I was trying to watch some HDTV and Full HD movies (Anime actually).
HDTV x264 ones performed quite well. CPU usage was ~20% and sometimes went to ~50% but I was using VMR9 render that is not very fast but i could test subtitles...
Next was FullHD one... That was quite a task for this 1.3ghz c2d cpu... Without subtitiles, when Overlay Mixer was used the movie didn't drop any frames, not bad here but I don't know so much japanese to understand everything =P
So i tried loading subtitiles on VMR9 render... WOW! I got sideshow, it was like 2 frames per second, you can't watch that! So I tried this:


- selecting EVR custom pres and set EVR Buffers to 45... I got smoother video now but sometimes it hanged for a while to load to buffer so I changed from full screen to windowed mode and for some reason it didn't skip any frame then... I would need to retest that few times to make sure what are the best setting for it to play smoothly.


I used external display with 1920x1200 32bit resolution to play the movie.

How long does it live?

Lasting on battery, power usage, charging time.

AFAIK Asus 901 has battery with highest capacity out there. It's 6600mAh/7.4v, huge, heavy one, letting you use netbook for quite a time.

BattStat shows capacity of 55272mW. That's a lot! Taking 55Watts of low profile computer system everywhere. Charging this baby takes up to 2 hours (or 3 if you stress it while charging).
Let's take a look how long it lasts fully charged.
First overclock it to 1680mhz with Asus' Super Hybrid Engine and play some game like GTA2 or Ragnarok Online. It lasts about 3-4hours on battery taking about 15Watts, that's not bad for running 3d games (of course you can try to underclock it and play games, maybe you will reach 5 or more hours =).

The lowest power usage i got was 5-6Watts(!!!), yes, no mistake here! But you need to turn off display or set the lowest brightness, underclock it to 1200mhz (or even block multiplier raising with SpeedSwitchXP), turn off any devices like camera, wireless or bluetooth. Now your netbook lasts 8-10 hours =)
Of course nobody wants netbook that does nothing, so let's find some lan wire and surf the net. If you leave it underclocked, it will take 7-10Watts, so 7 hours on battery if you are lucky. It takes about 1-2Watts more on wireless, and 1-3Watts more when overclocked.

If you run utorrent at night (of course downloading legal software =) while making it as powersavy as you can you will notice battstat showing 6-8Watts! That's nice for your power bill.


Watching movies eating your power =)

So let's see what video formats you can choose to watch on this smally.
As far as i tested Xvid works fine in SDTV resolution as well as in HDTV one (720p). Even AVC (h264/x264) works like a charm, of course SDTV one. The HDTV may bring you some problems especially when using softsubs (forget about o/cing to 1680mhz fixing your problem, you may still get frameskips).
So let's play some SDTV Xvid movie, now underclock it, wow no frameskips (no wonder it's just good old xvid), so fully discharging it will take some time. That said it's a good solution for long time watching on picnic or in school =)
Using AVC on powersaving mode may be a good idea as long as it is SDTV version. You may get a little more of your battery drain, but the quality is better.
As for HDTV, I didn't test xvid, but you may be able to play it in powersaving mode on unblocked multiplier. HDTV AVC as said above may be a bit of pain to play on this baby, as well your power usage will jump up a lot.