Like Dave Zatz and Matt Miller, I made the leap into the netbook pool with a new MSI Wind. Technically, I guess I really made my wife take the leap. She has been in disparate need of her own personal laptop as I am just too overprotective of and particular about my ThinkPad T61. What I really wanted to buy her was a top-of-the-line MacBook, but we just couldn't justify the price.  (Even with the Live.com cash back, the lowest price I could find was $1,300.)  After reading several blog posts and listening to a couple of podcasts, I got the idea to purchase a cheap, tiny netbook instead.

I scoured various reviews and picked the MSI Wind with the 10" screen, 160GB hard drive, 6-cell battery, and bluetooth. Here's why I picked it over the competition:

• I passed on the Lenovo Ideapad S10 because it only had a 3-cell battery and a poorly-reviewed keyboard.
• The HP Mini 1000 was a bit more expensive and sacrificed too much performance to get the slightly smaller size; I didn't like the tiny and slow iPod-sized hard drive and it doesn't have a 6-cell battery option.
• The Asus Eee PC 1000H was my second choice and is largely identical to the Wind, but I ultimately picked the MSI due to better Mac OS X compatibility should I choose to purchase and install that OS. It also has a better keyboard layout, although the Asus has a larger trackpad that supports multi-touch.

The best part is the price. $337 after applying the Live.com 25% cashback from Ebay. I can't believe how inexpensively laptops have become.

Of course, I had to do an upgrade. More memory is always better and I purchased an additional 1GB of Crucial Memory for $13 shipped from Newegg.

More details on my experiences with the MSI Netbook are to follow.

I think Microsoft should be given credit for single-handedly stimulating the economy. Consumer spending is down, most of the Black Friday deals are lame, but I'm purchasing things that have been on my Wish List for years.  Why?  Because I can get 25% cash back if I purchase an Ebay Buy It Now item and pay for it using PayPal.

This is such a good deal that I've I installed the Live.com search Add-on for Firefox and replaced Google as the default search engine.  I've found the search results to be just as useful as the Google results.  Live.com earned bought my loyalty.

Here are the details:

This discount applies only to buy-it-now items purchased with PayPal on Ebay.

Go to http://www.live.com and search for something like "wii".

You should see (at the top of the page in the Ad area) something that says "Live Search cashback" and an Ebay link and the 25% off offer.  Click the Link.

Once on Ebay, search for whatever you want (Wii, Nikon D90, MSI Wind, Sonos ZP90, etc.) and filter by "buy-it-now" items.  Purchase the item with buy-it-now and PayPal, and get 25% off. If the seller uses a third-party checkout, then the offer is not valid and you will be warned that the offer does not apply.  If they do use PayPal, the amount of the discount will be shown on the checkout screen before you pay.

This offer is good for up to $200/purchase and $2000/year.  The only catch is that you have to wait 60 days to get the 25% refund (to make sure you don't return the item.) This is good for up to 12 purchases on Ebay and then you are no longer eligible.

Apparently it was 35%-off a couple of months ago, then disappeared entirely, and now is back at 25%-off.  Who knows how long it will last. More details are available here:

http://pages.ebay.com/cashbackoffer/terms.html

Thank you Microsoft! (Who needs Yahoo! anyway? This is a much better use of that money.)

To get the best video quality playback possible for movies in a home theater, it's necessary for the refresh rate of the source component to match the refresh rate of the display. One of the most common problems stems from the fact that most movies are 24 frames per second while most televisions are 60 frames per second (approximately.)  It's not a simple mathematical conversion to get 24 fps to scale to 60 fps. There are processing fixes (reverse telecine) to overcome this problem, but the frame rate of the source material must be properly detected and the proper correction applied. The best solution is to send the original untouched 24 fps signal from the player, through the receiver, and on to the display, where the frame rate can be doubled / tripled / quintupled without any skipping or judder.

The problem for users of Home Theater Personal Computers (HTPCs) is that there are very few hardware combinations that will properly pass the original 24 frame/second signal digitally to the receiver/display; the video drivers don't support 24 Hz output properly.  One obvious example of this is the latest motherboards with the Intel G45 chipset. There is a setting in the HDMI video drivers for 24p, but the resulting video has noticeable jerks/pauses a couple of times a minute, apparently due to the driver improperly matching the output frame rate with the input frame rate.

Nvidia 9300 and 9400 chipsets - the first solution for HTPC 24p

The only exception of which I'm currently aware is motherboards based on the new nVidia 9300 and 9400 chipset. Multiple sources have confirmed that 24p playback is flawless over HDMI. Several vendors, including Asus (P5N7A-VM) and Gigabyte (GA-E7AUM-DS2H), have just released motherboards based on these chipsets.

(I plan on upgrading both of my HTPCs to the Gigabyte motherboard. Since Protected Audio Path is no where on the horizon, I see no need to wait.  Surprisingly, this is the cheapest upgrade I've done, because the motherboard contains everything I need for video, audio, and Blu-ray video decoding and I can use my existing CPUs, RAM, hard drives, cases, and power supplies.)

The downsides of 24p on a HTPC

The downside of setting the output of the HTPC to 24 Hz is that not everything is recorded at 24 Hz. Television shows are at 60 Hz. So if you're watching a movie, you select 24 Hz and if you're watchined recorded TV or TV on DVD, you select 60 Hz.  This is not automatic; you manually have to make these changes youself. So while a bottom-of-the-line Blu-ray player can automatically switch to the correct frame rate, an expensive and highly flexible HTPC cannot.

The simplest way to change the frame rate is to go to the video driver control panel and make the appropriate setting. But this is not very elegant for a HTPC. Instead, it possible to assign shortcut keystrokes to each resolution and map those to your remote control. This is a pain to setup, but it means that a press of the button switches between the two.

Theoretically, it's possible for a program such as My Movies to store the appropriate framerate for each movie / show in its internal database and issue the appropriate "change video refreash rate" command when each is played, but I don't think this is a supported feature yet.

What about 120 Hz?

A lot of flat panels advertise their 120 Hz refresh rate. This is the output video refresh rate of the panel itself, not the input refresh rate. The highest-possible refresh rate that is supported by HDMI is 1080p/60 Hz. No source component (HTPC or stand-alone DVD or Blu-ray player) can output 120 Hz over HDMI.

Conclusion

If you want a perfect video frame rate with no jerkiness or stutters over HDMI, it is possible on a HTPC using the latest Nvidia chipset. However, you manually have to change the output refresh rate of the video card, and knowing the correct framerate of the source materail is not intuitive. This is the price you pay for having a beautiful browesable for instant movie playback.

If you're a home theater enthusiast, you want the highest-quality audio and video possible, and that means Blu-ray with lossless audio (Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio) and the best video compression codec (VC-1 or MPEG-4 H.264 AVC HP.)

Most people would choose a Sony PlayStation 3 or stand-alone Blu-ray player to deliver this content to their receiver / display, but some people like me prefer to use a PC because it is extremely flexible and allows browsing and playing of movies backed-up on your hard drive. Although it is relatively easy to get full-resolution Blu-ray video from a Home Theater Personal Computer (see this AVSforum thread for hardware details), it is extremely difficult to get full-resolution audio. Here is a run-down on the current state of HD Audio on the HTPC.

Protected Audio Path Required

All Blu-ray movies with AACS protection, which is pretty much all of them, require a Protected Audio Path (PAP) to transmit the original HD audio if the bit depth and sample rate exceeds 16-bit, 48 kHz. Without PAP, all audio must be downsampled (a.k.a. "bit crippled") to 16-bit, 48kHz per the AACS specification. Unfortunately, there is no Protected Audio Path (PAP) on any computer right now, so all HD Audio is currently downsampled on a PC.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, most Blu-Ray HD Audio soundtracks are 16-bit, 48 kHz anyway, so you are getting the soundtrack in full fidelity. However, there are quite a few Dolby TrueHD / DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks that are 24-bit, 48kHz, so these are downsampled down to 16-bit, 48kHz. The same is true for the very few 24-bit, 96 kHz soundtracks (the maximum possible resolution of 8 channels.)

As far as when PAP will be available for PCs, no one knows. It is not a hardware standard that can be used across devices, it is not a universal Windows Vista standard (rather it is specific to each driver/hardware config), and there is no industry group working on a standard. The only possible way to have PAP is a proprietary solution specific to each piece of hardware.  Pluse, this hardwarw would have to be supported by uniquely by software players. Hardware and software companies working together — not a good thing! This could take forever.

Does downsampling make an audible difference in Sound Quality?

Every home theater enthusiast wants the best sound quality possible, even if the advantage is only theoretical. Having said this, even at the lower 16-bit / 48 kHz, the sound tracks sound amazing. If you can hear the difference between 8 channels of 16-bit / 48 kHz and 24-bit / 96 kHz, you have a truly golden ear.  I'm won't go into detail as one could nit-pick this to death, but you won't get any audible improvement even if there is no downsampling.

Even with the down-sampling, HD Audio is a significant step up in quality from compressed Dolby Digital 5.1/DTS 5.1 on DVDs. This a difference you can hear. Down sampling from 24 to 16 bits is not.

But what if AACS protection is removed?

If the down-sampling restriction applies only to AACS-protected Blu-ray movies, then you should be able to run AnyDVD HD and remove AACS from Blu-Ray. If this occurred, the software player should not downsample/bitcripple the output and existing motherboards with HDMI could play the full resolution signal. Unfortunately, all of the software players currently downsample regardless of whether the media is AACS protected or not due to stipulations within the Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master Audio codecs. Hopefully this limitation will be removed in the future and currently-available motherboards, even without PAP, will be able to pass full-resolution audio.

Is it possible to rework the movie and get HD Audio using a different player?

Yes, it is, but isn't easy. Basically you decrypt the Blu-ray disc using AnyDVD HD, split the audio and video into different files, convert the lossless HD audio track into a lossless 8-channel FLAC file (containing identical audio), and the recombine the video and FLAC audio in a MKV container and play it back using your favorite video player.  Unfortunately, you lose all the extras on the disc. See this AVSforum thead for details.

If the open source community develops an audio codec that can decompress these lossless formats, it will be possible to get software such as Media Player Classic to play the unencrypted disc. But once again, this means no menues or other content in the forseeable future.

What about bit-streaming?

The restrictions on bit-streaming are the same as on full-resolution HD audio: not allowed by AACS.

As an aside, there is no benefit to bit-streaming, as the end result is bit-for-bit identical sound. It's only a difference of the player or the receiver doing the decompression (assuming the player doesn't mess-up the decompression.)

What are the differences in all of the sound formats?

Good question; MissingRemote has an excellent overview that details which codecs can be sent over the older optical (toslink) connectors and which require HDMI.

Why is the HD Audio Steam so protected anyway?

This is a valid question. Since all the encryption schemes on Blu-ray have been cracked by both Slysoft and also independent developers on the Doom9 forums, there is full access to the unencrypted steams for pirates to copy. There isn't likely any way to introduce a new form of encryption without breaking all existing Blu-ray players. So the only result from all this protection is that owners of legitimate Blu-ray movies can't play the full resolution HD Audio soundtrack, but pirates can copy it without any issue. The media companies are ignoring the needs of their legitimate customers, which is disappointing to say the least.

Refrences: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=15006998#post15006998

I just finished reading an interesting article by Amir Majidimehr (former Microsoft VP, video compression) in Oct 2008 issue of Widescreen Review.  I was surprised that there are 4 different, incompatible versions of MPEG-4! Here are some facts from the article; I recommending picking up a copy of the magazine for all of the details and background.

• MPEG-2 was created in 1993 and gave great improvements of JPEG.
• Real Video and Windows WMV-9 were alternative compression codecs created for internet video streaming and are about 200% to 300% more efficient than MPEG-2.
• The MPEG association wanted to get into this segment and created MPEG-4 (later known as MPEG-4 ASP.) It was terrible, only 30% more efficient than MPEG-2.
• The European Standards body ITU created H.264 and it was much better than MPEG-4 for internet steaming video.  MPEG approached the ITU and they joined forces, creating the new MPEG-4 AVC, a.k.a. H.264 JVT, and it is completely different from and incompatible with the origianal MPEG-4 ASP.
• When HD-DVD was developed, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC, and Microsoft WMV-9 (VC-1) were compared. For HD video VC-1 was the clear winner, MPEG-2 was second, and MPEG-4 AVC gave the lowest quality/compression.
• MPEG-4 AVC HP (High Profile) was created to overcome the problems with the original MPEG-4 AVC, which focused only on low bitrate steaming video. MPEG-4 AVC HP is what is in every Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) player and it completely incompatible with MPEG-4 AVC.
• Every Blu-Ray player supports VC-1, MPEG-4 AVC HP, and MPEG-2.
• Microsoft seemed to have their act together throughout this process and developed the right codec for multiple situations from the beginning.  It's roughly equivalent to MPEG-4 AVC HP in quality but requires less processing power to decompress.