When the folks at Jolicloud announced that version 1.1 of the company’s Linux-based operating system would add support for 720p HD YouTube video playback and 1080p local HD video playback on a netbook with a dual core Intel Atom N550 processor, plenty of people were skeptical. While we still haven’t seen the 1080p promise turned into reality, Jolicloud has posted a video showing a netbook with an Atom N550 chip playing a 720p movie trailer from YouTube.
You can check out the video after the break. Playback looks pretty smooth — but the true advantage of HD video support on a device with a 1024 x 600 pixel or lower resolution display is the fact that you should be able to copy your HD video collection to your netbook and watch videos without spending hours transcoding them to a format that’s viewable on the mobile computer first. HD Flash video support is nice and all, but it’s honestly tough to see much difference between a 480p and 720p video on a low resolution display.
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4 Comments on "Jolicloud Linux demo shows 720p Flash video playback with an Atom N550 chip"
I guess that’s nice. Not sure if many people would want to play 720p Flash videos on their netbook. Maybe an occasional video played to a TV I guess but I won’t be doing that with most Flash videos I watch (YouTube or clips posted in news articles/blogs).
I do want to see Jolicloud put up a video where it plays a 1080p .mkv video (high profile and high level) though. It’ll save me time re-encoding my .mkv files to just watch them on a netbook while on the go.
I’m talking about Jolicloud proving their claim of being able to play 1080p videos with a netbook that has an N550 Atom CPU without using hardware acceleration. As for resolution, at least I can’t tell if a video is 480p, 720p or 1080p on a 10 inch screen no matter what its resolution is. That’s why I won’t be playing HD Flash on it.
I agree with the rest of your comments but I specifically just wanted to see Jolicloud proving their HD video playback claims by playing a 1080p .mkv. I’ve been reading more about Jolicloud and it seems their 720p video file playback “capability” for version 1.0 was greatly exaggerated. I’ve been reading people saying that none of their 720p .mkv’s played well.