The Pillars of the Earth Pt III 720p HDTV X264-DIMENSION

yeah my dvd doen

tpeets, thank you very much for the link! 🙂

just wondering ... how old is your pc? mine is over 7 years old (although i have upgraded a few
parts over the years) and i can play 720p video just fine - in software, since you'd be hard pressed
to find an agp video cad which supports h264 decoding. if you have anything better than a 2.4 ghz
pentium 4 then you *can* play 720 fine (for the most part) purely in software. just get the coreavc
video codec (not free, but since you're here i'm guessing you would also know how to "find" it, and
the (free this time) ac3 filter for the audio and you're set.

if you are on an old cpu like a pentium 4 (like mine, which is a 2.8ghz p4 now) then you will
probably need to change a setting or 2 in the decoder, the most important one is the deblocking
setting. change that to "skip when safe" and you should be up and running for most 720p h264 video,
though there will still be one or 2 that occasionally still need more grunt to run (even when
deblocking is set to skip always - usually the higher bitrate files at high detail parts of the show
[i had issues with a couple of the "scifi science" docos recently, that needed more grunt to play
properly at some high detail sections]). as for my video card, it's only a geforce 6200 so it
doesn't support h264 decoding to my knowledge, but that's about the best video card you can
currently buy new for an agp slot. (at least i haven't seen any better that weren't second hand ...
and cuda support, to help with decoding, in an agp slot ... i don't think so!)

if you are on virtually *any* dual core cpu then you shouldn't really be having any issues playing
720p h264 video with the right software. (unless it's a really slow dual core, probably slower than
1.5ghz, or perhaps a slower atom, but that's only a guess)

players can have an effect as well. wmp generally does not let you mess with codec playback quality
settings, so it can be annoying. personally, i'm using zoomplayer 5.00 and it works quite well, and
lets you play with codec settings all you want.

the only other things i can think of might be the resolution, or perhaps integrated video cards. i
am running at 1280x1024 so 720p video does not need to be scaled to fit the screen. different
resolutions may need some extra resources to scale the video to fit the screen, though generally the
video card should take care of that (even old agp cards). generally speaking, integrated video
cards (up until very, very recently) are pretty poor performers, and that would be another factor
slowing down the display of hd video if you have that kind of card.

another possibility is to reencode the video to xvid or divx before playing (and possibly drop the
resolution to 1024x576 or something similar). this of course, is less than desirable since it would
take several hours at least on a machine that can't handle the 720p h264 normal playback, but it was
something i did with selected episodes before i upgraded my cpu to the 2.2+ghz range, so i could
watch better quality video than the standard 350mb files.

other than that the only real option is an upgrade. i know, not what you want to hear, (and i've
been wanting to buy myself a new box for a few years now as well) but hd video does require a decent
amount of cpu power to be viewable, and mid to high end pentium 4 power is about the minimum
required, and there's no way around that. at least new computers are a lot cheaper now than they
were when you bought your current (now old, like mine) pc, and any new desktop pc will handle these
h264 hd video easily, even the cheapest ones shouldn't have any issues with it.

alpha3: i'd be surprised if your standard dvd player even supported h264 at all, let alone hd h264,
or hd of any sort for that matter. you really need a bluray player or ps3 for that. (and a ps3 can
be a little picky!)

bburwood, speaking for myself, i stream vids through my xbox (modded original, not 360) so that i
can watch them on my (non hi-def) tv. xbox 1 struggles with processing 720p from h264 - and my tv
wouldn't show much improvement anyway. that's issue 1. issue 2 is that .5gb is a third the cost of
1.5gb and i have a download cap per month - and it's a much quicker option (in terms of
download/upload time and no-recoding time). issue 3 is that i'm too poor to upgrade all my stuff! :-)

xbox 1 struggling with hidef is no surprise to me - it's only running a single core 733mhz pentium
3. you might get 720p mpeg2 to work with it, and a reencode to mpeg2 should be fairly fast (even on
a pentium 4), but you haven't got a chance of getting 720p h264 to work smoothly with it. i'd be
surprised if 720p xvid or divx worked either. i agree if you're going through a standard def tv
there's no real point to getting the hidef versions.

as for issue 2 ... yup, i've dealt with small download limits as well and it is nice to have a
standard res version available with the smaller file size. fortunately several isp's here
(australia) are finally starting to see the light and beginning to offer some larger download limits
at reasonable prices. totally get the reencoding time - it used to take me 9 hours per ep on the
celeron cpu to scale it to 1024x576 so i could watch it smoothly!

issue 3 - yup, same here! that's why i'm still only running a 2.8ghz pentium 4 (which started life
as a celeron 1.7ghz) that i've kicked along with various cheap (and sometimes necessary, like when a
hdd began to fail) upgrades over the years, but it's hitting it's limits now. there is only *1*
faster cpu that will work in my motherboard (the 3.06ghz ht enabled northwood pentium 4, and they
are extremely hard to find second hand), the ram is maxed out at 2gb, better agp video cards (than a
gf6200) are hard to find, and there's not much point in getting bigger hdd's (i have ~400gb total)
when i'm planning to upgrade once i have a half decent cashflow again. when i eventually upgrade
this time though, i don't want to go as cheap as possible, (i want a decent core i7 at least) so i'm
going to have to wait a little longer.

bburwood that's a lot of writing to explain something to a guy who will probly never look here after
leaving his message 😛 if someone is too lazy or stupid to use google to solve a problem like that
then they arent worth wasting your time on dude

now, does anyone want to comment on the actual file, scene stuff can be crap at times

hehe ... well, what can i say? i do tend to go on a bit sometimes. as for the file, i can't say
since i haven't downloaded it yet, but most 720p's tend to be pretty good. i did have to update my
coreavc a few months back to fix some bad visual artifacts that had started appearing. version 2.0
fixed those problems.

all of you go on and on.

impressive? hardly!!

meanwhile i cannot dowload part iii and i really want to.

any suggestions?

quality of the two immerse releases (part 1 and 2) are awful compared to the three dimension releases
so far (3, 4, and 5). any chance of getting repacks to fix this? or does anyone know where i can find part
1 and 2 in a better release?