Video Quality and Laptop Question

[lazyman22]

First Question. I am going to be buying here shortly a laptop with an HDMI to connect to my HDTV. Is there a certain video card, processor minium, and or brand that i should stick to? There is a lot of choices out there and many different video cards. I have looked into the dell studio laptops (which is i think windows integrated) and others. I am looking to not go crazy and stay around 600-750 for this laptop.


Second Question. I have movies on my computer that are already in .avi and roughly around 750mb per movies. If i were to use handbrake to convert this files to .mkv or this h.264 i have been reading about. Would i be able to get High defintion quality out of it even though its already on my computer in a certain quality? Would it be worth it to try an convert the quality to play on my big screen?

Hopefully I have explained my questions well enough and i appreciate any responce back.

[redwudz]

First question:

Really depends on the laptop's processing power and what it uses for a video card/chipset. Are you wanting to play back Blu-ray or just high definition video? You will need a card that can output 1920 X 1080 without straining. I would select a CPU with two cores or more and above 2.5Ghz speed. Higher is better. And hopefully the GPU (Video card processor) can do hardware decoding and take a bit of strain off the CPU. MKV can also be very CPU/GPU intensive. Best to look for independent/unbiased reviews for laptops that interest you. Not a lot of laptops can handle HD video properly.

Second question:

A definite maybe. MKV can give you much smaller file sizes than Xvid/Divx. But, unless you have a high quality source, you will just reduce filesize and quality by re-converting a ~700MB file that has already been (Over) compressed. Start with the original files and you may be able to reduce that Xvid/Divx filesize by half and still have close to the quality of the Xvid/Divx encode. And you should know that MKV may take a very long time to encode unless you have a very fast computer. I convert Blu-ray to MKV and that takes about six hours on a four core 3.3Ghz computer. I also had to upgrade my desktop video card to handle Blu-ray/HD MKV files. With a laptop, upgrades are unlikely, so you have to spend a bit of time researching to get a setup you will be happy with.

And welcome to our forums.

[tomlee59]

I interpret your second question a bit differently than Redwudz, so sorry if I misunderstand. But it sounds as if you want to know if an additional conversion of a pre-existing .avi can produce a higher quality result. The answer to that is basically no. Each conversion *degrades* the video, so you can't do better than your source. A conversion cannot magically create new information not present in the source.

If, as Redwudz says, you happen to have the original source from which your present avi files were made, you can re-encode those with the more modern codecs, and produce results that have a better quality-filesize tradeoff. But if those original source vids are not available, converting what you have will only make things worse.

[guns1inger]

And you certainly will not get HD quality from them.

[edDV]

Just play your existing files. The software player and/or display card chipset will scale them* to the TV the same way they do to your computer monitor. They will player bigger but not "better".


* assuming you output to the TV native resolution.

[lazyman22]

Thank you guys for all your information. Each one of you offered the information with everything i was looking for and it is greatly appreciated. I searched for information for about 3 hours yesterday and came across this website and i will always come here from now on for information! Thanks you guys again.