Most Monitors Will Not Play New HD Video

[pri9908]

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,122738,00.asp

[waheed]

Theres no way im upgrading my monitor just for HD Video. It talks about support on Windows Vista. What about support on Windows XP.

[MikieV]

Theres no way im upgrading my monitor just for HD Video. It talks about support on Windows Vista. What about support on Windows XP.

Last sentence of the article:

Think you could avoid this expense by sticking with XP? No such luck. To see HD, you'll have to upgrade to Windows Vista as well; Windows XP's security and driver models lack the ability to support HDCP. Consumers intent on viewing HD discs via their PCs will have little choice but to spring for the new operating system in addition to an HDCP-compliant monitor.

[MikieV]

No wonder Blu-ray wasn't in any hurry to introduce until 2006, and HD DVD is also pushing back their intro.

Why release a format which doesn't work with most existing HDTVs???

Time for the HDCP marketing blitz, just as consumers were just sorting-out all the "HD-ready, "HD capable", "HD compatible" labels. Sheesh.

[waheed]

Why not upgrade your whole PC system while companies are screwing with us. Let me check:

Upgrade Monitor to support HDCP
Upgrade OS to support HDCP
Upgrade Graphics Card to Support HDCP

I think I'll pass. Theres no doubt that this will soon be cracked at one time, if the format proves to be popular. Nothing is 100% Secure.

[Cornucopia]

That's why I think SD will be king for a whole lot longer. Too much corporate/BigBrother baggage with HD! Too bad though.

Scott

[RAAGAAman]

Its not just the monitor you will need to buy but you will probably have to purchase another PC. HD content playback at the Bitrates that are being proposed will take a High end Hyper threading processor with lots of memory and probably video acceleration. Oh, btw make sure it has a HDMI or DVI output so you can connect you Vista protected video output to your monitor.

RG

[Stingray]

Well no HD for me then...

[ROF]

I already upgrade my graphics subsystem every year, so this upgrade will be nothing new to most PC Users who aggresively use their PCs. If your PC itself is more than 3 years old, you have to ask yourself: Do I use a PC or do I sit there waiting for it to use my time? I see more and more people coming back on a regular basis wanting to upgrade a part, add something new, or take parts from an old system(drives mostly) to a newer system. Seems the world of PC users is finally catching on that Moore's Law is a fact of life and a PC is a constant investment. If you spend more than $2000 on a system you are either one of two things: Stupid or a super geek with loads of money to waste. It's better to buy a few parts now, buy a few more later, and then replace some of those parts you bought the first go around, rather than spending a ton of ca$h.

The people who really make me laugh are those people who spend $300 for a monitor and $400 for a graphics card. That $300 monitor will far outlast the $400 graphics card, and when it's time to replace the graphics card that monitor will still be worth close to it's original price whereas the $400 card is worth about $40.

Buy $mart, Buy Wi$e, but most importantly, buy knowing you're going to replace it sooner than later.

BTW, A few companies (Panasonic and Sony most notably) sell HDCP Terminal Expansion Boards, so those not wanting to invest in a new monitor/graphics board won't need to. A local shop sells them for $169, but they can probably be found cheaper.

[rhegedus]

If your PC itself is more than 3 years old, you have to ask yourself: Do I use a PC or do I sit there waiting for it to use my time?

Either way it uses no more time now than it did then

[ROF]

If your PC itself is more than 3 years old, you have to ask yourself: Do I use a PC or do I sit there waiting for it to use my time?

Either way it uses no more time now than it did then

I wish that were true. Most of the old PCs i see in the shop have never had internet files cleaned nor have they ever been defragged. It's sad I know, but it's a fact of life that computers double in speed and capacity within 12-18 months. If you aren't on an upgrade schedule, I'd recomend finding one.

[ozymango]

Most of the old PCs i see in the shop have never had internet files cleaned nor have they ever been defragged. It's sad I know, but it's a fact of life that computers double in speed and capacity within 12-18 months.

Sure, and for techno-geeks (like us!), we tend to stay somewhat up on upgrades as necessary. But as you noted, how many average home computer users keep on top of this stuff?

Point being, it's all fun and good to talk about "needing to upgrade," but you really have to consider the end-user: I work for a college campus and about 75% of the daily users use their computers 95% of the time for email, word processing, terminal access, and other operations that don't require a P4-3ghz to work very well actually. And frankly, it's neither cheap nor easy for your target home computer user to need to upgrade every X months because of Moore's law or whatever.

So you may upgrade your graphic subsystem often and it's no big deal to you, but that don't mean this is a minor thing for the majority of people out there. Sorta like, I tend to rebuild my car engines every few years, but I don't imagine that most people care to do the same!

[ROF]

I work for a college campus and about 75% of the daily users use their computers 95% of the time for email, word processing, terminal access, and other operations that don't require a P4-3ghz to work very well actually. And frankly, it's neither cheap nor easy for your target home computer user to need to upgrade every X months because of Moore's law or whatever. This is geek talk, this is not real-world end-user talk.

It's very cheap and extremely easy, no geek talk involved. Set aside money for upgrades, similiar to how you set aside money for auto repairs. Replace a part every now and again. Guaranteed at the time of replacement the person doing the upgrade will either perform the tasks I listed and more or advise you that you should have these performed on a regular basis. If you work on a college campus then you should know what 75% of your users are doing and it's not just the simple things you listed above. They may tell you that's what they do, but I guarantee you that if you visit their quad after 5PM and they happen to be sitting in front of their computer, I dare say 75% or more are not doing what you listed.

[ozymango]

IIt's very cheap and extremely easy, no geek talk involved. Set aside money for upgrades, similiar to how you set aside money for auto repairs. Replace a part every now and again. Guaranteed at the time of replacement the person doing the upgrade will either perform the tasks I listed and more or advise you that you should have these performed on a regular basis.

What world do you live in? And what do you consider, "Very cheap?" As it happens, I also work on cars and there are about 2 people in the world who set aside money for car repairs! I know more than a few people who've had their hard drives go bye-bye and a new one is $50 and it takes them a month to come up with that money. Maybe I only know poor college students?

I have no fault with your advice, I agree with you in principal, but if people did this kind of stuff then it wouldn't be an issue, ya know?

If you work on a college campus then you should know what 75% of your users are doing and it's not just the simple things you listed above. They may tell you that's what they do, but I guarantee you that if you visit their quad after 5PM and they happen to be sitting in front of their computer, I dare say 75% or more are not doing what you listed.

I'll take that bet. I'm also a network admin -- I know what IP addresses are doing what pretty much 24/7. Actually, I'm surprised at how much legitimite work goes on around here!

Seriously, again my point is, you are way too cavalier about the costs and effort involved in doing things like keeping your system updated to do things like HD video (which was the actual main post here, I believe). For you, an upgrade to an OS or graphic card is "very cheap" and "extremely easy," and let me dare say, if you visit your average home user and ask them if they agree with you or not, 75% of them won't.

[RottenFoxBreath]

but ROF,the vast majority of home users wont upgrade everything after buying a pc from say pc world*shudder*,in the next year to 2 years,and there the ones that need convincing.
personally i fell of the "must upgrade bi-yearly/yearly",when the kids came along,and i got a better car,and find that my 3200+ - OC'ed 1.5gig of ram,and my 9700pro does me fine for games,video,and the rest that a pc entails.
next time i upgrade will be if something goes tits up,and/or if the need arised when the above mentioned steps are needed,and i reckon another 2 or 3 years with this system will do fine.
mind you saying that,i just got offered a non boxed,display 9800XT for vitually nil,never used,its just sat in a cabinet for a few months,so thats it as far as im concerned.
the days of me and others like me,paying for uber expensive parts,which like you say,a few months down the line are worth $£0,are over.
and i wont be jumping on the next bandwagon till the prices are cheap,very cheap.

[ROF]

Nobody said upgrade everything, just something. How many people still have ball mouses today? I dare say quite a few. The expense involved to upgrade is nil, while the benefits of having positive tracking without the need to clean the darn guts out of your old style mouse is the biggest plus, not to mention that cool as ice blue or red light emitted from your tracking device. That's what I call an upgrade. You don't need, nor should you replace everything unless it's been years since you've done so. How many people still operate on less the 512MB of RAM. For little more than the price of a carton of cigarettes you can go from 256MB up to 512MB and it's easily upgraded by virtually anybody. The benefits of this upgrade by far outweigh the delays you are currently experiencing to open your email client. That's what I mean by this.

But really, those who say they won't upgrade for HD either don't really care about the quality of video produced or they have no upgrade schedule. Either way, I shouldn't have my technology hindered or reduced to the lowest common denominator because of the excuses given for failure to upgrade.

[rhegedus]

I wish that were true. Most of the old PCs i see in the shop have never had internet files cleaned nor have they ever been defragged. It's sad I know, but it's a fact of life that computers double in speed and capacity within 12-18 months. If you aren't on an upgrade schedule, I'd recomend finding one.

My 3 year old P4 2.26 still does everything I ask of it - ripping, capturing, converting, burning etc.

I had some problems recently with my system freezing for no reason even when the CPU was idle (tracked down to a dodgy 4 yr old HD I was using as the OS boot drive - I hope ). While trying to sort it out I did a quick pricing of a replacement system using up to date components - it came to about £1000.

Was a £1000 spend really going to improve my PC use? Nope. I'd still end up with the same files after the encode, but just that bit quicker.

I'd rather encode in batch overnight and save the £1000

[ROF]

3 years old? Do you perform hard drive maintenance regularly? do you use windows? Have you formatted the drive at all in those three years? Maybe you need to heed it's (the hard drives) advice and upgrade to a newer drive with faster speed and larger capacity. This simple upgrade will cost you anywhere from $40-$300 dollars. If your Hard drive is less than 120GB, which I dare say a three year old pre-built computer does, a 120GB is only $40, 160GB go for about $60-$80, whereas 200GB can be had for around $100. That's an upgrade you might want to consider. Trashing a three year old PC is a waste, unless it was POS when purchased, but a three year old PC will start showing it's age and without a regular maintenance and upgrade schedule, this age will start showing up more and more as time goes on to the point where upgrading isn't an option and a completely new PC is in order.

[waheed]

But really, those who say they won't upgrade for HD either don't really care about the quality of video produced or they have no upgrade schedule.

I have a fairly recent PC, but i spent arounf £375 on a 17" TFT Monitor over 2 years ago. sadly, it doesn't support HDCP so I cant view HD movies in Ble Ray/HD-DVD format. I do care for High Resolution video but due to a stupid copy protection scheme, I wont be spending more money on replacing existing hardware.

[rhegedus]

3 years old? Do you perform hard drive maintenance regularly? do you use windows? Have you formatted the drive at all in those three years? Maybe you need to heed it's (the hard drives) advice and upgrade to a newer drive with faster speed and larger capacity. This simple upgrade will cost you anywhere from $40-$300 dollars. If your Hard drive is less than 120GB, which I dare say a three year old pre-built computer does, a 120GB is only $40, 160GB go for about $60-$80, whereas 200GB can be had for around $100. That's an upgrade you might want to consider. Trashing a three year old PC is a waste, unless it was POS when purchased, but a three year old PC will start showing it's age and without a regular maintenance and upgrade schedule, this age will start showing up more and more as time goes on to the point where upgrading isn't an option and a completely new PC is in order.

Dude, read my PC specs - I've got over 1000Gb of HD spread out over 6 internal IDE HD and 2 external USB/firewire HD. I just used my old 40Gb HD for the OS as it's a nice size for maintenance (I used to do a format and fresh XP install every month until I bought Drive Image, since when I just re-installed the fresh image).

SATA drives might be quicker (the 10,000rpm ones certainly) than what I have, but since I can still capture DV without dropping frames so I'm in no rush to splash out of some SATA drives........ which would mean a new motherboard, meaning an new CPU, PSU, RAM, case and graphics card.

But really, those who say they won't upgrade for HD either don't really care about the quality of video produced or they have no upgrade schedule.

What the hell has HD size got to do with the quality of video produced?

[ROF]

I have a fairly recent PC, but i spent arounf £375 on a 17" TFT Monitor over 2 years ago. sadly, it doesn't support HDCP so I cant view HD movies in Ble Ray/HD-DVD format. I do care for High Resolution video but due to a stupid copy protection scheme, I wont be spending more money on replacing existing hardware.

I dare say your monitor is a 16ms or higher monitor. At high resolutions you must notice the ghosting. An upgrade should definitely be in your plans. The somewhat new, last six months, of 8ms 17" monitors benefits far outweigh the costs. You could probably sell your current monitor for $100 or more and apply that to the price of a $200 8ms 17" monitor. if high resolution video is important to you that is.

[ROF]

But really, those who say they won't upgrade for HD either don't really care about the quality of video produced or they have no upgrade schedule.

What the hell has HD size got to do with the quality of video produced?

Absolutely nothing. I was trying to bring this topic back to it's original topic. If you don't upgrade to the latest graphics technology (Monitor and subsystem) you might as well say you don't care about HD and forget about it. There are still people who refuse to buy DVD technology. That's fine, but considering the majority of people that visit here discuss backing up high quality media formats(DVD vs VHS), I'd imagine upgrading their graphics systems wouldn't be met with the resistence you see. For some it's a cost issue, which is understandable, but you can't expect backwards compatibility on everything.

[rhegedus]

If you don't upgrade to the latest graphics technology (Monitor and subsystem) you might as well say you don't care about HD and forget about it.

I don't follow......

The latest graphics technology is games driven, with ever increasing resolutions and fps. It does nothing for video whose eventual dimensions will be set acording to PAL or NTSC standards and will be displayed on a TV, even if it is a plasma one.

I can't tell the difference between my new NVidia GeForce 6600GT 256Mb and older VGA card for video editing and rendering.

[ROF]

I can't tell the difference between my new NVidia GeForce 6600GT 256Mb and older VGA card for video editing and rendering.

If you can't tell the difference in the time required or lag produced then I guess I can not explain it anymore clearly then there is a big difference between those two cards and the video displayed on screen. I don't know how much because an 'older VGA card" doesn't tell me any difference. I've got a 4mb Ati Rage Pro. Care to trade your 6600 for it? Why not?

[waheed]

There is a difference between graphics card. Also, the DVI port on your GPU must support HDCP to view HD movies. Some of the latest GPUs do support HDCP through DVI. I know mine does (6600GT PCI-E)

[rhegedus]

I can't tell the difference between my new NVidia GeForce 6600GT 256Mb and older VGA card for video editing and rendering.

If you can't tell the difference in the time required or lag produced then I guess I can not explain it anymore clearly then there is a big difference between those two cards and the video displayed on screen. I don't know how much because an 'older VGA card" doesn't tell me any difference. I've got a 4mb Ati Rage Pro. Care to trade your 6600 for it? Why not?

My older card is a NVidia GT4400 (I think).

Either way, VGA card power has little if any bearing on video rendering - it's all CPU.

And the lag when watching the final product on PC is non existant since the sound is in synch with the video, and always has been right back to my ATI 32Mb card.

[ROF]

My older card is a NVidia GT4400 (I think).

Either way, VGA card power has little if any bearing on video rendering - it's all CPU.

And the lag is non existant since the sound is in synch with the video, and always has been right back to my ATI 32Mb card.

It's all CPU huh? really? why bother purchasing an upgrade then if the same video is rendered identically in the same fashion and at the same speed? Why bother with a GPU at all? Why bother having DDR2 on a graphics card? I guess shaders are embedded in all CPUs? if that's the case, why do we bother to buy new graphics cards? The CPU does it all. Since you appear biased towards nvidia I'm going to search for an old GeForce256 someone gave me quite sometime ago. Since your CPU does all you need, you won't mind trading your 6600 for this tried and true graphics card? It's all CPU anyways, so there will be no discernable performance difference to you.

[edDV]

My older card is a NVidia GT4400 (I think).

Either way, VGA card power has little if any bearing on video rendering - it's all CPU.

And the lag is non existant since the sound is in synch with the video, and always has been right back to my ATI 32Mb card.

It's all CPU huh? really? why bother purchasing an upgrade then if the same video is rendered identically in the same fashion and at the same speed? Why bother with a GPU at all? Why bother having DDR2 on a graphics card?

For video encoding, the Graphics card is moslty idle. There are exceptions like the ATI All-in-Wonder that partially encodes MPeg in hardware if MMC software is used. New generation ATI and NVidia cards contain some hardware that could accelerate MPeg2 and MPeg4 decoding, and offers some 2D hardware scaling/mixing assist but little software is using it or just beginning to tap the power through DirectX* for effects rendering assist.

I guess shaders are embedded in all CPUs? if that's the case, why do we bother to buy new graphics cards?

You buy shaders if you play cutting edge games. They and other 3D features have little application to video encoding.

The CPU does it all. Since you appear biased towards nvidia I'm going to search for an old GeForce256 someone gave me quite sometime ago. Since your CPU does all you need, you won't mind trading your 6600 for this tried and true graphics card? It's all CPU anyways, so there will be no discernable performance difference to you.

You would probably find no difference for video encoding.

* DirectX is a set of software processes that can be individually replaced by Microsoft qualified hardware. Some of this hardware could be added by the graphics card, a TV tuner, an audio card, etc. Up until recently, most of this capability has only applied to video games. The latest versions of video editing suites have started using DirectX calls for cetain 2D effects rendering tasks and this trend will continue. If no hardware support is installed, the DirectX software routines are used. DirectX is also used to control TV tuners, audio cards, IEEE-1394 DV transfer and "realtime" uncompressed SDI hardware video paths.

Video encoding is still mosly done in software using the CPU or CPU+Hyperthreading hardware built into the CPU. Exceptions are hardware TV tuners with built in encoders (e.g PVR-250, ATI HD Wonder, etc.), PCI hardware encoder cards and USB2 external encoding devices.

[rhegedus]

Thanks edDV

Video Rendering and Computer Performance

Best CPU and Motherboard for dv editing

All the expensive consumer cards are aimed at is gamers. Period.

The high-end professional cards like Fires and Quadros will help certain applications that take advantage of the extra hardware on them such as CAD and 3D design applications.

Video is 2D so pretty much any video card to be had on the market today will do just as good as the next so long as it supports the monitor(s) and resolutions you want from them. I'd still get a decent brand name card just so you don't have problems with it, but otherwise they all work pretty much the same. As I said before if you're using a lot of 3D effects in your video productions you may want to get a better card to take some of the load off of playback/preview of the effects but you'd be using prosumer or better apps to actually utilize any hardware acceleration from the video card.

Oh and for those that say certain cards make video look better or whatnot I'm almost certain that has nothing to do with the card itself but more with tweaking your color settings on both your monitor and video card for it to look the best.

Graphics cards ...

Will do nothing much for impact. But, just be sure it's an AGP type.
I am using an ATI Rage Furo Pro (AGP) card, a Graphics and Capture
card in one.. though not an All In Wonder.
Find one that is a good 2D type. 3D is nothing but Bells and Whistles
attached for gaming and may also steal (hidding) resources and possibly
cause additional IRQ wows.

And that, as they say, is it

[Soopafresh]

This will be hilarious when the studio chiefs see their product isn't selling. I for one will laugh and point.

Oh, and on the PC end ->

$150 to upgrade to Vista

$500 (minimum) for an HDMI monitor

$400 (at least in the beginning) for a new video card

$120 for a new HD DVD drive.

$25-$40 per DVD


I'll bet the DVDs will be easily ripped in OSX or Linux.