Fansub Question Pertaining to a Future Netbook

[Muranodo]

Hello everyone.

I was wondering if I could get some technical help here.

I'm going to be living on-campus next year for college; I was contemplating on buying a netbook for a few reasons:

-Word processing
-Internet access
-Anime-watching
-Portability

I've been using the Combined Community Codec Pack for watching as long as I can remember, and I checked the details on the six or so series I'm watching currently; they all had this for their details:

Video: MPEG4 Video (H264) 1280x720 23.98fps [Video]
Audio: AAC 48000Hz stereo [Audio]
Subtitle: Advanced SubStation Alpha [Subtitle]

So pretty much all of the anime I watch is 720p (at least if I'm understanding correctly?)

So I was wondering if I could get any opinions on what netbook would be good. I've seen a lot of conflicting testimonies on whether anime can be watched on netbooks, so I thought I'd try and ask myself.

My budget would probably be around $300-$350. As another note, I'm not really concerned about gaming (I played Ragnarok Online and Guild Wars quite a bit in the past; I haven't been anymore), so I thought I'd mention that since I've seen it asked before when people advise on netbooks.

[JEEB]

I would say that most newer Intel Atom CPUs would be fine with 720p content when decoded with the CPU (I wouldn't be as sure of the very first Atoms, but I remember Daiz saying that those could do it as well with at least CoreAVC or some other H.264 decoder of relative speed), but I guess if you can get a system with a VPx chip'd nvidia chipset that'd make your life even more easy video playback-wise (although most of those seem to contain the buggy-on-some-resolutions VP3, although this might not be as big of a problem overall for you - wikipedia link).

My own Celeron M- powered netbook could do up to 1024x576 without any extra tweaking on mplayer-uau, and 720p was mostly watchable with the deblock loopfilter turned off (this was on ubuntu 9.10 at the time). I should re-test on ubuntu 10.04 after making some files ready for distribution.

[Muranodo]

Originally Posted by JEEB

I would say that most newer Intel Atom CPUs would be fine with 720p content when decoded with the CPU (I wouldn't be as sure of the very first Atoms, but I remember Daiz saying that those could do it as well with at least CoreAVC or some other H.264 decoder of relative speed), but I guess if you can get a system with a VPx chip'd nvidia chipset that'd make your life even more easy video playback-wise (although most of those seem to contain the buggy-on-some-resolutions VP3, although this might not be as big of a problem overall for you - wikipedia link).

My own Celeron M- powered netbook could do up to 1024x576 without any extra tweaking on mplayer-uau, and 720p was mostly watchable with the deblock loopfilter turned off (this was on ubuntu 9.10 at the time). I should re-test on ubuntu 10.04 after making some files ready for distribution.

First off, I want to thank you for your reply.

I have CoreAVC already, so I could potentially use that.

What would you define as newer Intel Atom CPUs? The 1.66GHz Intel N280 Atom Processor?

Something like these?

http://www.amazon.com/Acer-AOD250-15...2818728&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Asus-1005HA-PU...2818728&sr=8-2

I'd assume for the Nvidia chipset, something like this would be ideal:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...SIN=B002ZLOR5Q

Your thoughts would be appreciated if you have the time to spare. ^^

[synaesthetic]

You can do it, but the experience is not ideal. The screen resolution is lower than that of the video, so it's downscaled to 1024x576. You're pretty much forced to use CoreAVC and disable deblocking entirely. And high-bitrate stuff, any BD rips, will just skip and drop frames like crazy in high-motion scenes.

A lot of people forget that rendering soft subtitles takes almost as much processing power as decoding the video. A modern Pine Trail netbook (Atom N450/470) can easily handle 720p video without subs using CoreAVC. But add subs and things start to get ugly.

I'd say the minimum required to really have a good anime-watching experience is a CULV notebook or an AMD Neo notebook, which are like a slightly larger, slightly more expensive netbook with a higher resolution display and a much more powerful processor.

If battery life is important to you, go for an Intel CULV laptop, such as the Asus UL20A ($530 from Amazon), which has a 12.1" 1366x768 display and runs an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 1.3GHz ULV processor. It has plenty of power to play HD video, and you can also have the integrated 4500MHD graphics do the decoding if you use DXVA. Battery life is very good at 7+ hours with a full charge.

If cheapness is important to you, go for an AMD Neo laptop, such as the MSI Wind U230 ($480 from Amazon), which also has a 12.1" 1366x768 display, but runs a dual-core AMD Athlon Neo X2 L335 1.6GHz processor. The bonus is that the AMD Neo laptops come with ATI integrated graphics, the Mobility Radeon 3200, which is considerably better than the lame-duck Intel 4500MHD. Battery life is significantly worse than an Intel CULV system, however. You'd get about 4ish hours of life out of the U230 on a full charge.

Absolute cheapest option is an HP Mini 311, which is a rather good previous-generation ION netbook. You want to make sure to get the Windows 7 variant so you can use DXVA 2.0; CoreAVC is limited in what H264 it can decode in hardware by CUDA. The HP Mini 311 is actually an interesting machine because it's incredibly tolerant of overclocks on the Atom N270 processor. I've seen some guys over at MyHPMini.com get the 1.6GHz N270 to ~2.4GHz stable with minimal battery life impact. The Mini 311 gets about 5-6 hours of battery life.

[JEEB]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

You can do it, but the experience is not ideal. The screen resolution is lower than that of the video, so it's downscaled to 1024x576. You're pretty much forced to use CoreAVC and disable deblocking entirely. And high-bitrate stuff, any BD rips, will just skip and drop frames like crazy in high-motion scenes.

OK, it's not a perfect setup, since Atoms usually are near the bottom of the line as they've been made to be as power efficient as possible. But I'm not sure if you have to turn off deblocking with CoreAVC when using overlay on, say, XP :P

Also, yes -- high bitrate stuff might have problems, but heck -- even my celeron M could deal with most of the Gundam 00 720p stuff with softsubs that I could feed it at the time, and most of the problems were during the OP, and thus didn't really affect the watching experience. Different people have different limits on this kind of stuff, though -- so yes, that's a point, an N450/470 would most probably deal with such video much better.

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

A lot of people forget that rendering soft subtitles takes almost as much processing power as decoding the video. A modern Pine Trail netbook (Atom N450/470) can easily handle 720p video without subs using CoreAVC. But add subs and things start to get ugly.

News at eleven: VSFilter is slow. Yes, it's slow, but at least newer CCCP builds have faster settings for it. Also, I'd pretty much be sure that even with subs you wouldn't have that much problems as long as you'd keep to 720p.

Also, another point: there are other subtitle renderers than VSFilter as well >_>

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

I'd say the minimum required to really have a good anime-watching experience is a CULV notebook or an AMD Neo notebook, which are like a slightly larger, slightly more expensive netbook with a higher resolution display and a much more powerful processor.

Agreed on the CULV notebook choice, and, if you keep to CPU decoding, the AMD one as well.

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

...and you can also have the integrated 4500MHD graphics do the decoding if you use DXVA...

Intel's DXVA capabilities, hurr durr. Not to mention DXVAv1 specifically.

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

...The bonus is that the AMD Neo laptops come with ATI integrated graphics, the Mobility Radeon 3200, which is considerably better than the lame-duck Intel 4500MHD.

True on the gaming side, but don't bring ATi/AMD things onto the table if someone wants a stable hardware-decoding package. ATi/AMD's drivers are still a mess. I will stop my negative comments towards ATi/AMD as soon as they get their mess together, which is certainly not now -- looking at the threads on Doom9 and other places that still tell the story of broken decoding. CPU-wise I'd think this one would be on the level with a TL-50 mentioned in another thread here on Animesuki, maybe a bit faster (not really sure since I didn't check the details). Thus, 720p should be grantedly fine, and 1440x1080 in certain cases. Of course, DXVA can be tried, but it really can't be recommended because of the fact it can break all kinds of stuff quite randomly.

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

...so you can use DXVA 2.0; CoreAVC is limited in what H264 it can decode in hardware by CUDA...

Ok, here's where my bullshit'o'meter officially blew up. CoreAVC 1.x was limited only by its own implementation, and the newer version 2.x works perfectly with --ref 16 even on 1080p :V . The VPx chips are quite powerful, and the nvidia's API is so far the most stable way of using them (on both Windows and Linux). Granted, DXVAv2 with nvidia is much better than DXVAv2 on ATi/AMD, but please -- cut the FUD.

As for the examples given out by the OP, yes -- something like that 1201N would most probably be pretty good, since it has a VP3 chip. Just that I'd probably take a smaller SSD instead of a hard drive, since it just makes it easier to take the laptop into hands and walk somewhere with it. No real danger of breaking as many things as with "normal" hard drives.

The HP Mini example given out would look pretty good as well, although the CPU is a bit older (270 instead of a 330, the latter of which seems to be a dual core? -- didn't think those got onto the netbook market at all; Do correct me if I made a mistake somewhere along the way).

[Muranodo]

Thank you both for your thoughtful replies. The technical details....

Well, to be quite honest a lot of it was above my head although I understood portions of it.

With the MSI U230, it seemed similar to the ASUS 1201N in both price and specs?

Is there any chance, I could get an ordered listing of preference from the two of you?

The only other I could note is: I'm not super concerned about battery life since I doubt I'd have it on to myself for more than 4-5 hours.

Also, since I saw gaming mentioned ---> I wouldn't play any PC game above Ragnarok Online and Guild Wars graphic wants. So it's not super important to me since I've mostly done all I wanted to on there.

If it'll help, my current PC is a HP Pavilion a6244n Desktop (with a Samsung SyncMaster 941BW 19" monitor).

[AnimeFan188]

Top 10 Netbooks:

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/colle..._netbooks.html

Hope that helps.

[naoan]

If you can wait, this might interest you http://www.techpowerup.com/120457/Ac...Processor.html

[grey_moon]

I retired my 1000HE for a CULV lappy the ones suggested earlier by synaesthetic.

I now use the 1810TZ from Acer, it has a 11 inch screen and a full size keyboard. It is as light as my 1000HE is and did I mention it has a full size keyboard? I have to mention the KB thing again coz I touch type and using a netbook keyboard was ruining my typing times. The 11 inch screen is just perfect for doing any word processing.

The 10 inch for the 1000HE was okay, I also had the Asus 1201N for a few days, but the CPU just couldn't cope with flash heavy web pages and was slightly jerky.

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by JEEB

Ok, here's where my bullshit'o'meter officially blew up. CoreAVC 1.x was limited only by its own implementation, and the newer version 2.x works perfectly with --ref 16 even on 1080p :V . The VPx chips are quite powerful, and the nvidia's API is so far the most stable way of using them (on both Windows and Linux). Granted, DXVAv2 with nvidia is much better than DXVAv2 on ATi/AMD, but please -- cut the FUD.

It's not FUD; I love CoreAVC and I think it's a great thing to have. If what I said is bullshit, CoreCodec is the one doing the bullshitting. I specifically asked BetaBoy over at the CoreCodec forums about the reference frames issue right before CoreAVC 2.0 came out. He was the one who said that CoreAVC 2.0 is still limited to 15 or fewer reference frames due to a limitation of CUDA.

So I'm not just pulling these things out of my ass. I wanted to know damn well that CoreAVC 2.0 would do what I wanted before I plopped cash down for it. It only made it halfway--the weightp=2 issue was fixed, but still limited to 15 reference frames. At least that's what I was told. If it actually does work with all types of H264, then that's great.

Originally Posted by JEEB

As for the examples given out by the OP, yes -- something like that 1201N would most probably be pretty good, since it has a VP3 chip. Just that I'd probably take a smaller SSD instead of a hard drive, since it just makes it easier to take the laptop into hands and walk somewhere with it. No real danger of breaking as many things as with "normal" hard drives.

I kind of don't recommend the 1201N if you want battery life because it uses an Atom 330, which is a dual-core desktop Atom and uses a lot more power than the N-type Atoms. It also doesn't have SpeedStep (the N-type does) so it can't dynamically reduce its multiplier to save power.

Originally Posted by JEEB

The HP Mini example given out would look pretty good as well, although the CPU is a bit older (270 instead of a 330, the latter of which seems to be a dual core? -- didn't think those got onto the netbook market at all; Do correct me if I made a mistake somewhere along the way).

I suggest the Mini 311 primarily because it's one of the best ION implementations yet. Asus's 1201N gets better scores in artificial benchmarks, but the Mini 311 is cheaper, lasts longer on a charge and is very tolerant of overclocking (with hacked firmware).

[JEEB]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

It's not FUD; I love CoreAVC and I think it's a great thing to have. If what I said is bullshit, CoreCodec is the one doing the bullshitting. I specifically asked BetaBoy over at the CoreCodec forums about the reference frames issue right before CoreAVC 2.0 came out. He was the one who said that CoreAVC 2.0 is still limited to 15 or fewer reference frames due to a limitation of CUDA.

So I'm not just pulling these things out of my ass. I wanted to know damn well that CoreAVC 2.0 would do what I wanted before I plopped cash down for it. It only made it halfway--the weightp=2 issue was fixed, but still limited to 15 reference frames. At least that's what I was told. If it actually does work with all types of H264, then that's great.

Understood. Please don't take it personally, I've just seen enough people around who have no idea on these things and think that plain DXVAv1 is the greatest thing in hardware decoding ever that works for every video on the planet. On ATi cards... (not that I'm saying that they'll never support the same amount as nvidia, but as we've seen, it really takes them time to get it into even a somewhat working condition...)

I also don't love CoreAVC either, but I happen to use their decoders because of the VPx stuff mainly. And yeah, BetaBoy does say a lot of stuff before stuff gets out, and sometimes even during the release period. He did IIRC say on Doom9 that it got fixed, though -- and so it was. You can see the positive results on Doom9 on that.

TL;DR BetaBoy just wanted to make stuff look better from his POV, even though in reality the nvidia side was more capable. It wouldn't really make sense to limit your own API, while giving a random OS-limited API that uses the same chip more power. Also, this change appeared because a newer CUDA SDK's, on which CoreAVC 2.x got based on, VPx-related stuff got somewhat updated to be less needy of certain Windows components (oh Hanyuu I hate the umbrella-term'ification of this term).

<Here I originally wanted to post a BetaBoy quote on the issue, but after looking through pages 252 to 292 on the CoreAVC thread on Doom9, there were no comments on --ref 16 and VPx decoding. However, it's IMHO a well enough known fact (Daiz and others screamed about it on several places IIRC), and I've tested it myself as well -- so I can assure you that most of encodes will work. --bframes 16 --ref 16 1080p might have problems, but mostly anything else will work, no matter what the settings are. Not to mention that not many people use --bframes 16 --ref 16 nowadays on 1080p because of, say, the nice amount of RAM the lookahead of mbtree will need for such settings.>

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

I kind of don't recommend the 1201N if you want battery life because it uses an Atom 330, which is a dual-core desktop Atom and uses a lot more power than the N-type Atoms. It also doesn't have SpeedStep (the N-type does) so it can't dynamically reduce its multiplier to save power.

I suggest the Mini 311 primarily because it's one of the best ION implementations yet. Asus's 1201N gets better scores in artificial benchmarks, but the Mini 311 is cheaper, lasts longer on a charge and is very tolerant of overclocking (with hacked firmware).

Agreed completely, although yeah -- theoretically the Atom 330 would be faster. The mini 311 looks very good, and is a very good selection under the OP's wishes.

Otherwise I did spot the Thinkpad netbook -- but that one lacks on the hardware decoding side -- not to mention that ATi/AMD drivers seem to be borked on certain renderers and all kinds of funny stuff like that. Not to mention hurf durf Linux support.


Also, I did try my good ol' celeron M-based netbook (the original 900 model, 16GB lolslow SSD, ubuntu 10.04 + .34-rc6 kernel from Ubuntu's kernel repo) tonight with my under-work 720p DtB encodes with 5.1 FLAC on ffmpeg-mt-enabled mplayer-uau build (not like the multithreading really helps on this one, but I've just gotten used to enabling it when building, IIRC ffmpeg-mt could even hurt, but I haven't really tested the speeds). Results were rather good. With all the pretty eyecandy it would lag somewhat even with -lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=all , but after turning compiz off (like it usually should be on netbooks), it worked flawlessly on at least skiploopfilter=all, even on the higher-bitrate scenes (x264 didn't really take into account the first fade in the thing, even with fade compensation, so the crf was lowered nicely on that scene). Should test on a bit less speed-oriented settings now that the compiz is out of the video driver's way.

Granted, subs weren't in the mix yet, but since libass is a rather quick one, and because it worked rather well on the 720p G00ndam encodes I watched back while using 9.10, I'd say you would get rather good results even with subs. Softsubbed karaoke is a completely different topic, but libass still was magnitudes faster than VSFilter on such stuff when people checked it the last time.

Bottom line: 720p H.264 might not be decode'able on the slowest of the netbooks as-is, but it certainly is doable with some tweaking, and with some loss of quality depending on the situation (how much deblocking was used etc.). But yeah, ION netbooks would give much more freedom on this, thus being a much, much viable option. It's just nice to know that there's some CPU power to fall upon if the GPU suddenly doesn't work on something.

In a nutshell, I guess that a Mini 311, or any other ION + Atom netbook that actually fits the user's hands (keyboard/touchpad-wise), and that has a matching screen for the user would be good enough. After that the promised battery time and availability of SSDs could be checked. Most of the hardware is usually common between all of the Atom netbooks, which at least makes some of the selection process less hard for newbie users as long as his or her basic needs are mapped out well enough.

[synaesthetic]

I managed to get all but high-bitrate Bluray rips working on my 900 eeePC. The OP and ED segments were crapshoots, but the actual episode content worked. Actually, even BSS's BD rips of Darker Than Black OVA worked pretty much just fine. And the only tweaks I did was using CoreAVC, overclocking to 1.1GHz with eeectl and disabling deblocking.

Bluray encodes and really high end stuff is what failed. Trying to watch Frostii's encode of Summer Wars on the netbook was a stuttery experience.

Edit: The Atom 330 is kind of a faux dual-core processor anyway. It's really just two Atom 230 cores plonked down on a single package. Predictably, it's only faster in multithreaded apps, otherwise it's pretty much identical to an Atom N270.

[Tri-ring]

I was reading an article about the next generation Intel Atom processors and it really got me hyped.

Meet Moorestown: Intel's Atom Platform For The Next 10 Billion Devices
Imagine you’re running a 3DMark graphics demo at perfectly fluid frame rates. Then imagine you’re watching 720p, 8,000 Kb/s video at a steady 30 FPS. And just for giggles, pile on a camera with a little videoconferencing app showing you streaming at the same 30 FPS. Now put all three apps on the same screen. Not earth shattering for one system to pull off, by any stretch, but not bad, right?

Now, imagine all three of those apps running with that level of performance on the smartphone in your pocket.

Impossible, you say. There isn’t a phone in the world right now that can play video at those rates, never mind having the other two tasks running concurrently with no performance impairment. Well, my friends, I’ve seen it with my own two eyes.

Now if it is even half as good as the writer says and that is going to be my next toy.

[synaesthetic]

Moorestown is an SoC for smartphones.

[Hajile]

If you're gonna have anime watching as part of the netbook criteria, i'd recommend to stay away from anything AMD.

Despite the advertisements and promos about AMD's platform supporting h264. What they don't say is that it doesn't actually fully support it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nok3B_fCU6w

1080p = You guys know that the subbers tend to go overkill on their encodes. You can't use it on ATI cards (They don't work on my 5850 either). You can do it from the CPU on the desktop, but it's mandatory to be able to play on the netbook.

720p = Many from my collection doesn't work, you can still do it in software (tho not as smooth for the more intensive ones), but between it and torrents, there wouldn't be much over for anything else.

I've been asking around and everyone points to the inherent flaw in all ATI GPU's.

Only reason i'm still holding on to it is that it's still technically faster than a 1201n

[JEEB]

You're correct at least partially. The current ATi/AMD GPU drivers do suck (not that open/closed source DXVA2 implementations don't, but hurr durr), but they've got some Level 5.1 stuff to work on UVD2-based (?) hardware IIRC. They did add some other bugs, though, which is rather funny considering how ATi/AMD has been trying to work around several things in their drivers lately.

In a nutshell: Yes, as I have stated already, I wouldn't recommend ATi/AMD hardware for a GPU H.264 playback solution, but also, as far as I know, their drivers have lately gotten better. It's partially the DXVA2 implementations nowadays that bring the problems upon ATi/AMD (not surprising, though -- there have been hacks and stuff for ATi/AMD in such for ages). Now only if ATi/AMD would've given their own API straight to us, just like nvidia... but that never happened.

Non-UVD2 hardware shouldn't be thought to be usable at all. Very limited and all the usual ATi/AMD treats.

Edit: Night+allergy blooming is never good. Anyways, the other point I wanted to point at was that with the newest ATi/AMD drivers Level 5.1 H.264 should play with UVD2-equipped GPUs via DXVA2 (the 720ps and 1080ps you mentioned). Whether or not a decoder or a version of a decoder will let you do it is a completely different problem altogether. I wish the open source implementations would already become one, esp. since I don't have much belief in the ones that come from MPC-HC's lineage.

[Hajile]

Is there any chance it'll be fixed in a driver to allow HD3200 users (media center and netbook chips) to play h264's with higher reference frames? Or is it a hardware limitation?

[synaesthetic]

It's a driver issue, not so much a hardware limitation. I've already given up trying to get hardware acceleration working properly (without bugs and other nasty stuff) on my Mobility Radeon 5650... it just ain't working.

I give up, and I can, because my Core i5-430M is more than beefy enough to handle 1080p BD rips--already tested it out through HDMI (playing K-On! 1080p BD rips), works beautifully with CPU usage around 40-45% using ffdshow in multithread mode. Though the CPU seems to hit max turbo (2.53GHz) the entire time it plays 1080p, it usually stays at a low 11x multiplier when playing 720p content with CPU usage around 16-25%.