New Hardware Announcement: 1080p Notebook Capture with TrueHD Mobile

December 17th, 2008

Take a custom-built notebook, an ExpressCard to PCI Express interface and the Digital Foundry TrueHD Express capture card and this is what you have - 1080p video acquisition in a complete package that weighs just 3.2kg. They say that a picture’s better than a thousand words, so let’s up the ante a touch with a hastily put-together, but quite illuminating video.

A welcome return to our old friend Ridge Racer 7, capturing directly into the CineForm codec at 1080p via TrueHD Mobile. To give some sense of scale, that’s a 13.3″ sub-notebook.

No hardware has been altered here. You can remove the TrueHD Express card from the enclosure, and run it in your PC for all the benefits outlined here. But card performance on the notebook is reduced from PCIe x4 bandwidth down to PCIe x1. In real terms, that’s 720p60 and 1080p30 at 8-bit YUY2 (courtesy of CineForm compression) and 720p30 and 1080p15 at 24-bit RGB, via the lossless codec. Bearing in mind speed limitations on notebook hard disks, you can’t really ask for much more. While the notebook can run from batteries, the enclosure itself requires mains power, that’s pretty much the only major limitation.
Otherwise, as it’s the same hardware, there’s support for component, VGA, DVI and HDMI and crucially, the quality of the assets between desktop TrueHD and the mobile iteration remains identical.

A selection of Ridge Racer 7 1080p screenshots taken directly from the TrueHD Mobile captures encoded in the CineForm codec. Quality level is identical to the standard-setting desktop version. Click on the thumbnails for the full-size shots.

So… obvious question out of the way first. Why custom-build the laptop? The short answer is that my Dell XPS M1330, using the same core parts, didn’t work properly. I’d expect the same to be true of many different notebooks, depending on the BIOS. Right now I’d also rule out using Vista for the OS too. It drains too much power, particularly on the graphics card. Our realtime scalable preview window needs all the juice it can get there.
Things might (probably) change with the new Centrino 2 based notebooks - higher FSB, faster CPUs, more memory bandwidth. You’re looking at a Core 2 system of 2.6GHz or better, integrated GPU, and a nice, fast SATA notebook drive to allow the hardware to truly flourish.

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