Blu-ray Disc Playback

For our Blu-ray playback testing, we used Cyberlink's PowerDVD 8 Ultra with the standard settings enabled and audio was sent over HDMI to our test monitor. The Casino Royale BD-DVD is one of the most popular Blu-ray movies to date and it is a high bit-rate h.264 stream, which makes it ideal for testing CPU usage.

We used five minutes of playback during a high motion action section with lots of panning – we recorded the average and minimum CPU usage during this section of the film.



The J&W MINIX with the single core Sempron CPU averages below 50 percent CPU, whereas the Jetway is closer to 70 percent. Both spiked quite a lot more in the more intense action scenes, and as such the Jetway wasn't able to cut it and stuttered on two occasions where the J&W did not.

It's worth noting that unlike PowerDVD 7 Ultra, we found that even when paused PowerDVD 8 uses ten percent CPU usage and a whopping 258MB of memory on the single core Sempron with the Jetway GeForce 8200 motherboard, considerably adding to the overhead of the system. With the dual core Athlon 64 X2 we found PowerDVD (7) Ultra used just 31.6 percent CPU versus ~50 percent with constant stuttering on PowerDVD 8. On the J&W MINIX there was also a difference but to a smaller degree between versions 7 and 8, and on both versions with the dual core CPU the playback was sufficiently smooth.

The Jetway GeForce 8200 board also demands the use of its digital connection which is HDCP compliant, as you'd expect. Surprisingly though, with the J&W MINIX board we could use standard VGA out onto a CRT and the Blu-ray disc would still work.

After using both pieces of Cyberlink software there are subtle differences in the way both handle Blu-ray content and the older PowerDVD (7) Ultra is not only less resource intensive, it's quicker to playback, skip but more notably restarting stopped video, the installer doesn't try to force Google Toolbar or its MoovieLive service on you and its generally more compatible than the latest PowerDVD 8.

h.264 High-Definition Playback

For h.264 playback we used Media Player Classic - Home Theater Edition under the Enhanced Video Renderer filter option (guide here) which enabled use of the video accelerator inside today's IGPs just like PowerDVD. Unlike Cyberlink's solution though, MPC-HC is completely free.

The 720p trailer we used was for the movie, Fantastic Four, with a bitrate of 6,217kbps and two channel AAC sound at 189kbps. For 1080p playback we used the Serenity trailer which is encoded at a bitrate of 7,998Kbps and two channel AAC sound at 192Kbps.



The first thing to note is that the GeForce 8200 chipset didn't take to the EVR in MPC-HC so we had to resort back to using PowerDVD for IGP video acceleration here. Even with just a sub £20 single core CPU both boards were able to handle HD content perfectly well with plenty of overhead to spare and both the Jetway and J&W flop back and forth over who's better between 1080p and 720p trailers.

With a dual core processor, the J&W is marginally consistently better, but only by a few percent and both use below ten percent of the CPU.