Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I'm considering getting a used T60 or T61 laptop to take with me on family vacations so I can download video clips from my HD camcorder. The clips created by the camcorder are 1080i AVCHD files in the m2ts format and are pretty cpu/gpu intensive. I've listed links below for three sample clips I've taken. Can anyone with a T60 or T61 download these and let me know if they are playable? Please list your laptop cpu/gpu specs when replying. Thanks.


http://db.tt/qnO07yzR

http://db.tt/b8H79UJC

http://db.tt/cYkPTx5n

They play on the laptop screen but are a bit choppy. They play fine on my Dell LCD 2007WFP external monitor through the docking station. The CPU is at 100% .

My unit is a T60p T7600 2GB RAM, ATI FireGL V5250 W7 64bit. I played with Windows Media Player. Tried with VLC and it was choppier.

Bruce

It's also choppy in my modded T61 with Intel graphics I've upgraded the HDD to a new Intel 320 SSD (80GB), 4GB RAM and the screen is a WUXGA from a T61p. Tested with VLC under Linux Mint 12 64bits.

CPU1 was at 100% while the second one was around 20%

I think for graphics intensive applications a T60p would have the best graphics. Or you my try to gather the latter T61p models produced after August 2008 (IIRC)

Hope this helps...

Watched on an R60 with 2GB ram, X1300 gpu and T2500 cpu on linux. Choppy and dropped too much using vlc but mplayer handled the clip with only some complaint.

tried the first one only with the last VLC player. It plays fine, no hickups, CPU at 55%.

the picture becomes more focused though when you stop the camera, while when you move the outline of the leaves on the trees for example are not as a straight line. That could be from your camera though.

anyways, my CPU runs at 2.8GHz on both cores with no throttling ... so pretty fast in other words The gpu is overclocked but only when running 3D stuff, so for 2D I even underclocked it - from 169 to 100MHz, memory at 200MHz.

hope that helps.

My specs are in my sig. The T61p of course has the NVidia Quadro FX 570M. I have the 1680x1050 15.4" screen.

Using the latest VLC, the clips start playing fine then become uselessly choppy after several seconds.

Unmolested T61ps don't come much more powerful than mine. Some were optioned up to the T9500, but I've yet to see one of these that wasn't upgraded by the owner...

Unless you want to really screw around with your machine like miro_gt has, you'll need to get a more beefy machine than a loaded T61p.

Another possibility may be software optimization? Although VLC should have several codecs integrated in the player, you may want to check which codec your HD camera is using and install it in your future laptop.

My 2 cents...

catback wrote:I'm considering getting a used T60 or T61 laptop to take with me on family vacations so I can download video clips from my HD camcorder. The clips created by the camcorder are 1080i AVCHD files in the m2ts format and are pretty cpu/gpu intensive.

I am using a Frankenpad composed of a T61 Penryn mainboard hosting a T9500 CPU with 15" UXGA IPS/Flexview Display powered by the Intel X3100 onboard graphic. The machine is running Linux kernel 3.1.6 with the latest available packages from Debian/unstable (=bleeding edge). I used both mplayer2 version 1:2.0~git20111203-0.2 and vlc version 1:1.1.13-0.0 (the videolan website only mentions up to version 1.1.11 though?) to play all three files full screen.

I mainly downloaded the files for testing the video limits of my machine, and was very pleasantly surprised to see them all running very fluently, with almost no perceivable choppiness. I know that the T9500 Penryn CPU does have at least some video transcoding advantages, but this is not what i would have expected for a T61 with mere integrated graphics, especially since JeffCullen reports a completely different picture on a more or less similar machine, but equipped with a much more powerful nVIDIA GPU. Unfortunately, i am not currently in the position to perform a comparison in Windows, but maybe it can be assumed that the Linux based setup has some positive influence here? Well, i fear this will remain pure speculation without further comparative testing, but which is not something i will invest any additional time.

Nonetheless, if i were in your place, i'd rather try to get hold of a suitable T500, as this should give you much more bang for the buck, especially since prices for used units have come down so much in the recent weeks. For your use case, i wouldn't want to purchase a machine which is still on the bare edge of hardly perceivable video choppiness. You surely require something which has some more performance advantages than just that.

On my T60 with T7200 CPU these clips play smoothly, if and only if I use the CoreAVC decoder. The total CPU load is about 80% during playback, which means both cores are pretty heavily used. Single-threaded decoders (such as the old libavcodec used by ffdshow) cannot cope - they overload one core to the max, while the other one is idle, and it's clearly not enough (CPU usage is constantly at 50% while the video stutters badly).

The first plays smoothly in a T61p with 2gb ram and a very basic (slow) harddrive. This is a unit I was testing before pulling the system board and it doesn't have all the drivers installed, just a basic win7 x64 installation for testing.

It played equally well in a T61 with nVidia NVS140m

However the mpeg2 transport stream isn't designed for quality, it's designed to be able to easily digest errors or missing bits of data, so it's sometimes a bit to eager to drop frames, etc... something with a well encoded x264 video would be a better test.

I really cant see why you guys are having problems here. If I'm getting CPU usage of about 55% then a common T7500 CPU should run it just fine at about max, as the cpu itself has about 75% of the processing power of mine.

tested with LinX, mine at 2.8GHz makes around 17.5Gflops, while I have here two other T61 laptops with T7300 both running dual IDA so at 2.2GHz those make around 12.5Gflops, thus that should be sufficient to play the videos with no problem.

could it be the OS or the drivers that you're running that is giving you problems? I'm on clean installed XP 32 bit from quite a while ago, with all updated drivers.

well, I just confirmed it plays fine on a stock T61p with only the basic 2gb ram and a 5400rpm drive. I think any T61 will play these fine with the right codecs installed.

miro_gt wrote:I really cant see why you guys are having problems here

I also find strange that my T61 won't play the videos well. I also think that is a codec issue since I don't watch movies in this TP, I'll try to install CoreAVC as dr_st recommends and give it a second try.

Edit: Ha! Thanks to google I used mplayer (which seems to have a CoreAVC alike integrated) instead of VLC and now the videos play with no stuttering at all!! The power of software

I downloaded Media Player Classic, and bought CoreAVC. The videos are perfectly watchable now, but I had to turn OFF the NVidia CUDA acceleration in the CoreAVC config to get the videos to play smoothly, so I'm not getting to use my snazzy graphics chip at all. That said, Task Manager reports both cores at around 70% to do this, so not a ton of head room...

I really think a T500/W500 makes more sense at this point, especially considering how much cheaper DDR3 RAM is. I did insufficient research when buying my T61p a few months ago and if I could spin back the clock, I'd get a W500. Only thing I don't like about the x500 is the nasty "lenovo" log on the lid... then we have the x510 and x520, which have a keyboard that feels vastly inferior to me but are considerably more powerful machines...

Jeff, you can buy a T61p a lot cheaper then a w500, and judging by your specs in your sig, the only bad research was not getting a gen2 gpu, but if your interested in swaping the boards, you could get most of your cost back if you put your old board on ebay. I've seen them sell close to 200 at auction, and some commercial sellers actually get as much as 500 or morel.

Fair point. At the time I bought the T61p, I wasn't concerned with the cost as my previous laptop had failed and I wanted a replacement quickly... I was set on a Thinkpad and this machine was available locally, quickly. I would probably have tried to wait out ordering a new T520 if I hadn't had my hands on a few and been so disappointed with the keyboards... I had used a friend's T60 and was very impressed with the keyboard, researched that they used the same keyboard on the T61p, and pulled the trigger. Plus I prefer the 16:10 aspect ratio to 16:9.

From what I understand at this point, the W500 has switchable graphics which would likely provide considerably better battery life, while not sacrificing power when plugged into the wall. Sounds ideal! Plus SATA in the UltraBay, and DisplayPort on the side. I don't care about the bigger touchpad as I use the TrackPoint exclusively...

The only money I've "wasted" since buying the T61p is the DDR2 RAM, and everything else could be carried forward to a W500. I can't really see throwing more good money after bad at this point, so while my T61p continues to perform perfectly, I can keep my eyes open for my ideal W500 configuration and then sell the T61p on to someone else who can either enjoy it as is or choose to update the board :)

--jeff

JeffCullen wrote:then we have the x510 and x520, which have a keyboard that feels vastly inferior to me

It actually feels vastly inferior, or are you referring to the layout change?

I don't care about the layout change. As for feel, I'm rather picky... I have a box of old IBM Model M keyboards to keep me going past 2050... The ThinkPad 600X I used years ago remains my benchmark for laptop keyboards...

I have two friends who have T60s -- one has a Chicony keyboard, the other Alps, which is the same as my T61p. I am quite happy with these, while I am not nearly as impressed by the feel of the keyboards on T510s and T520s in my client base. Don't get me wrong--they're still better than most contemporary notebooks, but things do seem to be getting worse. To my fingers, the newer keyboards seem to have a less positive response and a flatter, cheaper feel... I like the keys to feel very solid and mechanical, and prefer a very audible click. I type quite hard (I play bass, guitar, and piano so that might have something to do with it as my fingers are fairly beastly...) so maybe that has something to do with my particular requirements... can't count how many times people have asked me why I'm beating the heck out of my laptop keyboard!

Jeff, I feel the same way about keyboards. You should see the keyboard on my 17" HP laptop... DV7-4060us, the keys are flat pads and you can't "feel" when one is pressed... I swear the designer should be shot. It also has touchpad ONLY, and the buttons are hidden under the touch surface, so it's not possible to click and drag... making all the input devices barely functional at all (at best). A case of great concern over appearance, and none regarding function.

Yet another reason why HP laptops are not high in anybody's esteem...
I was given a HP Pavilion, which should have been on the nVidia crap list, but somehow never made it on there.
If it hadn't been for free, I wouldn't even have looked at it.
It's a huge widescreen monster with no usable parts except the wifi card and the RAM...

My boss is a HP maniac so there are tons of business-class HP machines in our client base... several 8510p/8510w machines which are HP's equivalent to the T61/T61p. I have to say they aren't too badly built, but the keyboards are really unfortunate. They've also got a blue TrackPoint knockoff which is totally unusable. They have incredible WiFi performance, however...

I find the EliteBooks to be really hit and miss at this point, and everyone who's agreed to step out of the HP Program and into a Thinkpad has been really pleased so far :)

I've also had some experience with the HP Compaq/Elitebook business models. Starting from the xx10 series, through the xx30 and xx40 all the way to the latest xx60 series. And I must say the trackpoint is indeed one thing I cannot stand on them.

The trackpoint cap itself being bad is not the biggest issue, actually, especially since it can be replaced with a Thinkpad cap. My biggest qualms are others: first of all, for whatever reason, the 12"/14" models don't feature a middle trackpoint button, which loses the convenient middle button scroll feature. And the 15.4-15.6" models that do, somehow have very awkward and inconvenient buttons (especially on 8510 series - it seems I find myself hitting the keyboard bezel instead of the button half the time).

But some people at my workplace actually prefer them. For starts, some people don't use the trackpoint at all and don't care about it. And HP's laptops do have some other advantages.

One point I certainly have to give to the 8510w over the T61p -- the graphics chip (same FX 570M) is on an easily swappable card...

The fans are jet-turbine loud and run constantly, on the other hand!

I tested it on a T61 with a T7300......NVS 140M......2GB RAM.......WORKS Great in windows media player 12!!!!
I suggest you a t61 with the NVS 140m chip BUT with a unit building date of August 2008 (08/08) or later......ask Off-Lease sellers on ebay to check if they have eny of those!

Worked for me!!!
WEI: 4.1

I actually have one of the HP/compaq business class models here, it's not a bad unit, perhaps a cheap knockoff of the 14" T61, but it has some impressive features and works well, but my complaint is about their elite, ultra sleek "looking" pavalion DV7. I purchased one direct from HP when my first T61 died... and forget the debate over good/bad trackpoint, as I said it has NONE... nor does it have any touchpad buttons at all, only a touchpad that clicks when you press it.... pressing on the right is a "right click", pressing left is "left click", but because the buttons are hidden, you can't hold them down and drag something... if you want to drag/drop files, you'll need an external mouse, or you can change the settings where a single click picks items up... but that's beyond annoying too.

As far as typing on the keyboard, anything more then a password or a few words and I'd not even try it... it has no ergonomic feel at all, the keys are tiny pads less then 1/16th inch thick and give no "report" when pressed, either in sensation or audible. The only way I can type with it is to look back n forth between the screen and the keyboard to double check everything, which I'd never accept because I neither look at the keyboard nor the screen when typing, so imagine trying to enter a large amount of text from a hard copy... looking at the document/keyboard/screen/keyboard/screen/document... etc... it would drive me insane. I normally just read a document and type as I read, then don't even look at the computer until I'm done and am ready to proof-read. Impossible on this pavilion.

It is pretty though, which I actually find insulting... but it makes a nice portable video player.

system: 6458AM2 07/10 build T61p, nvidia140m, 4gb ram, T7300, winXP 32bit

used satsuki decoder pack's media player classic to play

all 3 clips played flawlessly at full screen w/ cpu ~ 50%

I did some more research, and it looks like there are good (and free) alternatives to CoreAVC as well. The modern, multithreaded ffmpeg-mt library (which is used by new versions of ffdshow) achieves just as good results on my T60.

Granted, my CoreAVC version is old (1.9). It is possible that the latest version (3) is faster than ffmpeg-mt, but for T6x it's not super-relevant.

ya you no i do not under stand why you guys are having any problem with these videos i can play them with wmp/vlc with no problem at all