H.2009/9/2 Tamas Rudnai <tamas.rudnai@gmail.com>:
>
> I do not know what laptop is that -- OP was talking about an 18 month old
> Dell one, so I assume that is a Core Duo or Core 2 Duo or maybe an AMD. That
> should perfectly do with software codecs -- I have a Dell laptop (Core 2
> Duo) and have no problem even with the Matroska (MKV) codec, which
> compresses the HD movie to a very high density (a HD Ready movie fits into a
> single layer DVD). However, MKV needs a huge CPU power to uncompress and
> play the content -- unlike the H.264 which as far as I know was designed to
> be able to play on a less powerful embedded machine.

Tamas,

MKV is a container, meaning it stores the real data and the
information about how such data is stored within the file itself. In
fact, as it is an open container, MKV is a very flexible and it can
store almost anything you throw at it, so you can have an MKV file
with data stored in H.264.

In the other hand, MKV is ussually used to store H.264 compressed data
using X.264 open source encoder; */possible flame starter alert/* it
is said by some people that this encoder produces smaller files from
the same source than other proprietay encoders */possible flame
starter end/*. That *could* be the difference. Also you might be
playing back 720p encoded files as they are ussualy made to fit in
DVD-5.

Regards,

Carlos.
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