Another CUDA Day coming up for me and now, it is business as usual for me. Got hold of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in full HD (High Definition) from a friend of mine for testing purposes only. Already seen it in the movie theatres and no wonder the action scenes make it my family’s favourite. Now High Definition content is encoded in the H.264 format and the format extension is .mkv. What a disaster! Windows Media Player cannot play .mkv files and I don’t wanna install hoggers like VLC Media Player. Eat too much of RAM and memory. I like to leave anti-viruses on while watching a movie as part of my periodic PC maintenance. Sadly, it seems it isn’t possible when playing HD with VLC. So what will I do? No VLC and WMP, what are my options left?
So, I start searching the net to play HD content which can also use the new found CUDA prowess I got all thanks to Digit and nVIDIA. So what do I come up with? A software name CoreAVC. Now what it basically does is add support for the .mkv format in Windows Media Player and not only that but also, utilises the nVIDIA CUDA power reducing load from the main CPU and taken over completely by the GPU, a process also called offloading tasks to the GPU (which is the nVIDIA GT 240). Now, it doesn’t have a trial and I need to buy one to use it. Now my Dad being so supportive of me quickly gave his credit card and I made a transaction worth $9.95 (or roughly Rs. 456) for this software but is it worth paying for? Let’s find out.
Before I planned to try CoreAVC, I decided to give VLC one last shot at. Installed it and started it up. That’s it; VLC consumes CPU around the range of 30-50%. BAD! And memory usage was also 105 MB. Worthless. Screenshot below will tell you the ugly story-
So uninstalled it and decided to give the new CoreAVC a try. Greeted with a nice “Designed for nVIDIA CUDA” logo during setup and my heart felt happier. Program setup screenshot in the link below-
But it still needs to be tested. So installed it. Setup finished pretty quickly. Now, decided to fire up Windows Media Player to see what it does. And voila! It does the nVIDIA CUDA magic. The CPU usage was only around 3-10%. Cool. Lots of room left for other tasks. And memory usage was similar to VLC’s. A screenshot to demonstrate the CUDA power-
So at the end of the day, it is simply more than obvious at which software emerges triumphant here. Windows Media Player has always been the underdog in performance but CoreAVC changes the complete outlook of Windows Media Player and makes it a much desired high performance HD player. So the next time, you get HD content in your home, just fire up Windows Media Player with CoreAVC and simply sit down to enjoy the magic. Oh yes, and some finer details regarding the video if you wanted to know more about the test video.
Movie Name - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Format - .mkv
Resolution - 1920x800
Frame Rate - 23.98/second
Bitrate - 1536 kb/second
CoreAVC verison - 2.0
Edition - Professional
2 comments:
Cmon man why do you need cpu power for other tasks while watching a movie?
Another good post....will be back for more!
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