[soul]

Originally Posted by tattobilla

I don't know if it's just me or everybody has the same problem. I borrowed my friend's Mini 12 for a day to check out the performance. Mine should be coming this week.

When I play a Video no matter what format it is, the video quality is ****. Everything else is Ok. It goes same for Vista and XP.

I heard about GMA 500 that it's not as good as other GMA cards but I didn't expect it to be this shitful. DivX movies look so horrible. I used VLC latest version on both XP and Vista.

Please tell me If anybody else has the same issues. If yes, then I'm not even gonna bother to open mine and just return it.

I'm looking forward for a fix coz I love everything else about Mini 12.

I'm running windows 7 and video seems to play fine.
Although once in a while a video won't play smooth & it's horrible at fast fowarding.
I fix this issue by turning off aero, actually when MPC or VLC turns on. AERO is automically off so I can FF or RR quickly. I notice a increase in performance on the DS / GBA emulator by turning off AERO.

[robandjeanne]

I tried an Acer 10 inch from Costco running XP. The test I used were video clips from the microsoft site. The Coral Reef ran smooth at 720P, the Amazon adventure started to run, then couldn't keep up at 1080P but still the Acer was giving 1080P a good try. These were both run at full screen with a nothing special Atom 270 in a standard Acer. I can't believe Acer is that much better than Dell, but I will say the Dell 1010 fails miserably to run Coral Reef at 720P making it look more like a slide show.

So first question is whay is Dell 1010 so bad, and next question why is a standard ho hum Acer so good right out of the box. Incidently I wish Dell would fix this problem, because except for video I like the Dell better than the Acer.

[Kelvinyam]

I also found that YouTube at normal screen (not full screen) is on-and-off choppy. Not too bad but enough to annoyed me.
Playing DIVX via VLC player at full screen is fine though, but I have to switch off the player control panel in the setting.

[dragonmule]

Hi, I will share what I have learned about ubuntu linux video playback and this gma 500 chipset in the 1010 and 1210. People seem to already know much of this, but I found good keywords for future googling.

The reason "dellbuntu" works to playback videos and a machine purchased with vista/xp and ubuntu installed does not is due to the Fluendo codecs compiled for VA API. The mplayer-vaapi is a patched version and appears to work okay as a backend. Index of /~gbeauchesne/mplayer-vaapi

The support from mplayer and even ffmpeg for hardware encoding will be ongoing, but it does not appear that the flash video format will be following suit. Many of us know flash is not the best graphics implementation for video and has been adopted for networked video mostly due to the ubiquitous nature of flash installs. This is why even when using the proper psb xorg driver and the proper video player backends, flash video looks choppy. From a technical perspective, I doubt that this will change anytime soon even in non-proprietary flash implementations such as gnash.

However, even without flash support, the video rendering for GMA500 will likely get better in both Windows and Linux as the video players themselves support acceleration for the GMA500. One might note that lack of player support is the likely culprit for VLC player being garbage with the GMA500.

[Dell Mini Fan]

Oh man, I'm just about ready to buy the Dell Inspiron Mini 10. I realize you're all talking about streaming/youtube videos sucking.

What about movies that have already been downloaded or transferred onto the Dell, meaning movies that do not need internet connection to watch?

Thank you

[Kelvinyam]

Standard DIVX resolution plays fine using VLC. The problem with Youtube is due to it's flash base, which is handled by CPU rather than the graphic chips.

[dragonmule]

Youtube HD videos can play just fine as long as they aren't streamed. It is streaming through flash that is naturally slow, but we can bypass that.

nathan hammond :: YouTube HD Download Bookmarklet

If you right click on the youtube downloader script and add to bookmark toolbar, you can download the HD version of any HD movie on youtube.

Whether or not you have the h.264 codec installed to play these back is a different issue. All things considered, you can get a good video quality with a modest CPU/GPU taking a few steps whereas someone just clicking around the web would need a very fast (and expensive) machine to achieve the same results.

[dragonmule]

Should add that if you are using linux, you can buy the full line of Fluendo codecs (minus DVD) here

Complete Set of Playback Plugins | Fluendo Shop

This is a good investment for people who want to be able to upgrade to any future version of linux which supports GMA500 but does not include any patented media codecs for GStreamer.

There is also a very nice Fluendo DVD player for linux which was released recently.

[reydemia]

The GMA500 absolutely just plain sucks. Its darn old tech, why intel hasn't come up with something new, i don't know. They came up with the whole menlow/publuso(however its spelled) chipset, which is just a GMA500 with hardware decoding of specific formats like H.264, just to cover it up. The menlow platform can't even scale a video to fullscreen correctly! AND the dell mini 10 doesn't even have hardware decoding! JUST A CRAPPY GMA500! I just don't understand why intel hasn't come up with a better solution, or better yet why dell went with the gma500/z-series atom in the first place!? I mean i know for battery life purposes...but for all practical reasons, the 10 and the 10v get around the same battery life. So their engineering in the 10 must really suck.

[dragonmule]

Originally Posted by reydemia

The GMA500 absolutely just plain sucks. Its darn old tech, why intel hasn't come up with something new, i don't know. They came up with the whole menlow/publuso(however its spelled) chipset, which is just a GMA500 with hardware decoding of specific formats like H.264, just to cover it up. The menlow platform can't even scale a video to fullscreen correctly! AND the dell mini 10 doesn't even have hardware decoding! JUST A CRAPPY GMA500! I just don't understand why intel hasn't come up with a better solution, or better yet why dell went with the gma500/z-series atom in the first place!? I mean i know for battery life purposes...but for all practical reasons, the 10 and the 10v get around the same battery life. So their engineering in the 10 must really suck.

I actually have no problems with 720p fullscreen video playback with DVD or encoded video files. Dell pushed these out too fast as it seems like many of the people posting on here from a couple of months ago had all sorts of problems. Dell should have worked this stuff out before release.

What specific problem are you having? If it if flash, good luck, I've never had good experience getting flash to work right.