Thinkpads Forum

Apparently a T60 (T2500, 3GB ram, Intel graphics) can play 1440p video smoothly. I was quite surprised, knowing that the cpumark score is 878. I used the video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YGDyPAwQz0, downloaded it, and played it using mplayer in Arch linux 32 bit. The command I used was:

mplayer -vo x11 -fs -zoom nameOfVideo

I set mplayer to use 2 threads (uses 1 by default) by adding lavdopts=threads=2 to the .mplayer/config file (you can add the above args to the config too). The cpu usage averaged 95%, but the playback was nearly perfectly smooth! I suspect 4k video won't play very well on this system, but maybe a T9500 T61 with a FX570m could. It would be awesome if someone could try this out.

I think this might also work an a top of the line T43p. Although I only have a T43 with 2Ghz PM, 2GB ram, and X300 gpu, the cpu usage was only ~60% for most 1080p videos using mplayer.

The great thing about this is that if you install a youtube client, such as youtube-viewer, which uses mplayer instead of flash, you can watch 2k videos quickly and easily without the need to download any videos. If you do try this, try it without the -vo x11 -fs -zoom part. I had to use software rendering since the default xv driver (or any other driver) did not work. The intel gpu probably lacks the necessary optimization and acceleration features in dedicated gpus for xv to work on videos over 1080p.

Try it with the -benchmark option, so we'll know if it actually drops frames or not.

Also try -vo=xv:adaptor=1 to use the hardware overlay. If the colors look a bit off, you'll need to play around with the chroma settings with xvattr. :O

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YGDyPAwQz0

I'll test this video on my X61 T9300 with Debian 7.0 64-bit first. After that, I'll put it in a flash drive and play it on my other machines.

Addenum:
Only the highest setting (3840x2160, this is what's referred to as 4k) had severe playback problems in mpv (I don't have mplayer installed).
2560x1440 only caused 10 dropped frames at most (mostly because I was switching back and forth between the video and the terminal windows.
I didn't test 1920x1080, because that's only 60MB in size (low bitrate), and I've tested much more CPU-intensive 1080p videos before. (H.264 Hi 10 Profile video that's 225MB but only 1 and a half minutes long.

I actually benchmark computers using videos of varying codecs and video frame sizes, usually categorizing them as 480p, 720p, and 1080p capable. This is the first time I've tested 1440p and 2160p videos though.

-vo=xv will fail for videos larger than 1080p because the maximum XVimage size is 2048x2048 for my GMA X3100, and I suppose it's the same for your GMA 950 as well.

There is no well-defined term "2K" in the industry. What do you mean by "2K video"?

I should have been more clear. I was referring to 1440p video.

As for -vo=xv:adaptor=1, the video would not play, unfortunately. Only the x11 driver with -zoom would show up properly. I ran the video with -benchmark and got:

BENCHMARKs: VC: 75.441s V0: 149.645s A: 0.000s Sys: 1.797s = 226.891s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 33.2497% V0: 65.9582% A: 0.0000% Sys: 0.7921% = 100.0000%

Not quite sure what these numbers mean though. A T9500 T6* with a high end discrete gpu would probably be able to play 1440p without issue. Amazing considering these machines are almost 10 years old!

My T42 with radeon 9000 gpu can do 720p video so the T60 doing 1440 doesn't surprise me.

Likewise, I'm not surprised.

This particular 1440p video doesn't have a particularly high bitrate--7 megabits/sec--whereas most BDs are encoded between 20 and 40 megabits/sec.

Lower bitrate means less data for the CPU to process, so even if there's 78% more pixels to show (2560x1440 is around 3.69 megapixels vs FullHD's 2.07MP), it's still within the T2500's capabilities.

As for -vo=xv:adaptor=1, the video would not play, unfortunately. Only the x11 driver with -zoom would show up properly.

I ran into that problem as well. As it turns out, xvideo (xv) on the GMA X3100 (and quite possibly on your T60's GMA 950 as well) supports a picture size of up to 2048 x 2048 pixels.

1440p is 2560 pixels wide, so xvideo doesn't work.
vo=opengl would either fail or have poor performance, so x11 is the only mode left.