Watching Vice Video on a train with an X61T & Tmobile Note 4

[precip9]

I spend a lot of time on New Jersey Transit, between Trenton and NYC. My Galaxy Note 4 has LTE Advanced, with impressive bitrates (25mb/s moving), so an experiment was performed, watching Vice video, my favorite, from a moving train, with the X61T tethered via USB to the Note.

I installed a Crystal (Broadcom) hidef decoder in the second slot of an X61T with the Middleton BIOS. Streaming started south of Newark about 10 in the evening, with the Vice video, "Exploring the 'Nazi Village' of Jamel", duration 9:25. The first several minutes were choppy. But then, either because the network allocated more bandwidth to my phone, or in the range of a higher capacity area, the video smoothed out and increased in resolution. Vice resolution is not manually adjustable. My guess would be that the video started out at 480p, and switched to 720p after ~5 minutes.

According to the Tmobile account app, the first video used about 60 megs of tethering for 9:25 . A second 12 minute video, "American Obsessions: Tracing the History of Pinball..." used about 240 megs, apparently delivered at a higher bitrate.

I was seated at one of the two seats in the NJT car equipped with AC outlets. After the first two minutes of "Pinball", I pulled the plug.

For this test, the battery power plan was set to 20% maximum processor state and a passive cooling policy. That the laptop was able to play smooth hidef video with these constraints is entirely due to the Crystal decoder. And smooth it was.
In 10 minutes remaining, the battery charge declined from 100% to 94%, a very modest drain of about 0.6% per minute of video.

The Crystal hidef decoder is not a graphics device. It is a single-stream coprocessor specialized to performing repetitive block instructions on a video stream. In order to obtain the results described above, these conditions must be met:

1. The video must be Flash based, not HTML5. For Youtube, it's necessary to install one of the Firefox or Chrome add-ons that deny HTML5 to the querying website, and force the use of Flash video.
2. Because the Crystal decoder presents as a non shareable resource, only one Flash containing tab can be open in the browser. If more than one Flash containing tab is open, the tab with the video may not be able to acquire a lock on the Crystal decoder driver.
3. Because of the weakness of Intel integrated graphics in an X61 or X61T, far less power is used when the video is displayed in full screen mode than in windowing mode. Paradoxically, displaying a tiny video in a tiny window uses a lot more power.
4. Because of the power inefficiency of older wifi chips, the above figures on power consumption cannot be duplicated watching video through wifi. LTE Advanced uses far less power.

The decoder has similar effectiveness in an X61 (non tablet) with Windows 8.1

Summary: The Crystal decoder, when installed in an X61/T, makes battery powered display of hidef video a highly feasible activity, with performance comparable to newer machines. However, it is not as versatile in a windowed environment as discrete graphics.

Of the T-Mobile tethering allotment of 5GB, about 300 was used in this experiment to watch about 22 minutes total video. This, unfortunately, makes Vice Video on a train with any kind of cellphone tether an unaffordable vice, except, perhaps, towards the end of the Tmobile billing cycle.

[Temetka]

I've been reading about those decoders and they are very interesting.

But with HTML5 replacing flash, are they still needed?

[precip9]

Flash and HTML5 provide "container formats." This is different from the codec, which is the compression scheme. Think wrapping paper versus present.

The driver for the Crystal card interacts with stream.sys, which provides the interface to programs that wish to use the decoder. It "advertises" available decoding services. A decoder program/plugin checks the advertising, and can decide to use the service. If you are a Firefox user, HTML5 video is decoded by one of the installed plugins, with Cisco the default. I think the Cisco decoder uses the Crystal driver, but I can't recall how I decided. I quickly lost interest, due to the generally bad performance with Youtube. I think Videolan 3.0 has plans for support in the plugin. It already supports Crystal for other jobs.

To put it another way, Flash and HTML5 are received at the input end by plugins, typically Flash & Cisco, that manage the streaming off the web. They unwrap the stream, and look for the default decoder. They feed it to the decoder, take the output, and feed that output to a window.

The reason I specified Flash for these older machines is that current implementations of HTML5 streaming for laptops are inefficient. Even on a powerful machine, they are not yet up to the efficiency of Flash, which itself is no great example of efficiency. There are a lot of complaints about smoothness of HTML5 video. I compared HTML5 to Flash on a W500, which should be up to the task. HTML5 had a few burps and hiccups. So it isn't mature yet. On phones, the situation is reversed. Optimization of HTML5 for phones was done from the start.

HTML5 is still being worked on, with plans for enhancement that should make it exceed the performance of Flash in the future, provided the programming is optimized as well.

[brchan]

Flash generally gives better performance than html5. Firefox seems to default to it, while chrome defaults to html5. An X61 shouldn't have problems playing full screen 720p and 1080p (for higher spec models), but playing the videos at this resolution on a 1080p monitor will. I just recently discovered this with my intel T61 with T9500 cpu. 1080p (even at 60fps) video works flawlessly on the internal SXGA+ monitor, but moving to a 1080p monitor, where all the pixels are displayed, becomes a bit choppy. This was on a very minimal install of Arch Linux, so there were no excess services running.

[precip9]

On Windows 7, Firefox does not default to Flash on Youtube. It requires an add-on to force it.

My experience is with the X61T and X61s.

On Windows 7, an X61T cannot play 1080p smoothly without the Crystal card.
Without the card, CPU usage pegs at 100%
720p makes the machine get very hot very quickly.

There are no "hi spec" models of the X61T. They have low power CPUs as with the X61s.

On all these machines, the crucial benefit provided by the Crystal card is the ability to play hidef on battery power, with minimal heat and minimal battery drain.

[Temetka]

Yes, but you are referring to a ULV C2D machine.

Let's re-do my initial post. With today's much better specced machines (i5, 4-8GB RAM), is such a card necessary?

For example, my T410 plays 720p and 1080p with zero problems at full screen. CPU useage is minimal at around 15% or so.

[brchan]

I don't see why newer machines would need such a card, but older ones can benefit from it. Also, there can be a big difference in performance when playing 1080p on an SXGA+ display vs a FHD display, since all the pixels are rendered. This is more of a problem on older older machines (and playing native 4k on some modern laptops).

[precip9]

Yes, but you are referring to a ULV C2D machine.

Let's re-do my initial post. With today's much better specced machines (i5, 4-8GB RAM), is such a card necessary?

For example, my T410 plays 720p and 1080p with zero problems at full screen. CPU useage is minimal at around 15% or so.

No, such a card is not necessary or even desirable. The Crystal card is medicine for the Merom (first-generation Penryn) core. My experience with the W500 indicates it is not useful with 2nd gen Penryn either. A W500 or T400 plays hidef just fine, with low CPU usage.

For regular voltage Meroms, the Crystal card saves a lot of battery power. And plugged in, a laptop will run cooler.