Looking for a laptop capable of playing 1080 movies over HDMI

[Blackeyez]

Hi all

The time has come for me to dump my stationary computer for another one and since it was a long time i followed the development on the linux hardware front... I'm in need of help!

I'm looking for a computer thats ready to playback HD-media even in matroska format aswell as capable of delivering dolby digital & DTS sound through HDMI. It dosent matter if its nvidia, ATI or Intel graphics card, as long as its relatively hasslefree. I was thinking of a eeepc 1215N but since lots of its hardware dosent seem to be compatible in linux, i decided not to bother. What about some of the i5 cpu's?

Keep in mind that I live in europe and cant order from the US, since that'd put me out of cash

[Rubberman]

Don't bother with integrated video since it "shares" system RAM, doesn't perform as well, etc. Here is a Linux laptop from ZaReason.com in the US. They ship internationally, so while it will cost you a bit more, it should be reasonable. This one has a good nVidia video system and HDMI output.

Verix 1656 :: Laptops :: ZaReason, Inc. :: Laptops, Desktops, Servers, and Peripherals Designed for Ubuntu Linux

They have other systems that are cheaper which may still do what you need.

[Blackeyez]

Hey, thanks for the reply. Was going to give up hope about getting help in this

I searched around and i found a smiliar laptop, with GeForce GT 320M - the lapton in question is Acer Aspire 5741G that i might go for (what do you think of that?).

But I also wonder, video acceleration wise wich are better... nvidia with vdpau or intel/ATI with XvBA?

[Rubberman]

I haven't used an ATI card since the Wonder years... AFAIK, nVidia currently has better drivers for Linux. I have an 8800GT card (dual head) that I use with CentOS which works fabulously - I can run dual HD video streams (one on each 1920x1200 display) without stutter. I also have a nVidia chip set in my Dell D630 laptop and it does HD very well also.

[Blackeyez]

That's weird, either my computer must be foobar or your videocard runs on stereoids, because my GeForce 8800 GTS does NOT do a very good job at accelerating 1080. its one of those high-end cards that just missed support for vdpau... which is the ready why i was slightly iffed with nvidia and was curious on the alternatives

This could also be a product of that evil kernel bug 12309 (Large I/O operations result in poor interactive performance) which bottlenecks my system. Either way, i'll make sure to buy a laptop with a return policy!

[Rubberman]

Well, I do run this card on a dual quad-core Intel S5000XVN motherboard, running dual E5450 Penryn 3GHz Xeon chips w/ 8GB of RAM. The OS is CentOS 5.5 and it is running a recent 64 bit release of the nVidia drivers - 256.35. I'll probably update the video driver the next time the kernel is updated.