Tricks On Optimizing HD Video: Saving Battery Life
During the IDF Fall 06, Patrick Wong, Intel’s Marketing Engineer of Digital Home Group, talked about tricks for Developers to optimize HD Video playback as well as ways to saving power. Most are for developers, but there are still some tricks we may borrow to enhance our existing playback time.
First, we should play video in Full Screen Mode. Windowed mode exposes the desktop, desktop refresh rate, and Windowed mode exposes the desktop, desktop refresh rate, and composition. Thus, Windowed mode enormously increases the power and compute Windowed mode enormously increases the power and compute. It’s a burden of the compositor. If we play video in Full Screen Mode, we may get a power saving up to 1 Watt.
Second, we may use DXVA 2.0 Substreams supported software instead of old D3D mode. Microsoft will add extensions to the coming DirectX Video Acceleration Pipeline upgrade (DXVA2) to support composition and graphics streams for HD DVD. This will include support for clear-rectangle, secondary video, background images/solid color and advanced sub-title planes. This composition technique offers substantial power savings over a D3D (blend) based composition. This would further save the power up to 1W.
Intel also suggested more tricks to developers including using Bounding and Transparency Rectangles (Power save up to 0.5W), Reduced Timer Interrupt Frequency (Power save up to 0.5W), Optical Drive Read Ahead (Power save up to 2W), and Reduced primary video to 30 Hz (Power save up to 4W).
With optimizations, in fact, we can expect a further 1.5 hours playback as a result from power saving. Moreover, Intel also has research on battery with manufacturers to enhance the power capacity. In a combine of twos, even mobile may provide long duration High Definition playback. Mobile Home Theater is no longer a dream.
Source: HKEPC
