MPEG-4 (AVI) 720p High-Definition Playback

For MPEG-4 (AVI) playback we again used PowerDVD Ultra and again played the files from a hard drive instead of disc. The 720p trailer we used was for the movie, Ray, with a bit-rate of 3,336kbps in DivX 5 and two channel MP3 sound at 191kbps. For 1080p playback we used the Elephants Dream movie-short which is encoded at a bitrate of 9,998kbps and six channel AC3 sound at 448kbps.



The 10MB/s full-HD 1920x1080p Elephants Dream video is particularly intensive and it shows up considerably on both machines with the single core CPU. Even though it's "just" DivX, there were frames dropped and evident audio/video desync.

With a dual core CPU, both machines handled it perfectly, but again the J&W pulls out slightly ahead in 720p decoding.

WMV9HD Playback

For WMV9HD playback we again used PowerDVD Ultra and again played the files from a hard drive instead of disc. The 720p trailer we used was for the movie, Doom 3, with a bitrate of 6,790kbps and two channel WMA3 sound at 440kbps. For 1080p playback we used the The Living Sea trailer which is encoded at a bitrate of 9,847kbps and six channel WMA3 sound at 384kbps.



The combination of J&W's AMD 780G chipset and a single core Sempron simply cannot play the 1080p WMV file, and while the Jetway GeForce 8200 gives it a go, it was barely holding in there on a few scenes. With a dual core CPU things were appreciably better, but the J&W again uses the best part of 20 percent more CPU load than the Jetway.