There are several different formats for compressing High Definition video. It’s not just the resolution that is different, e.g. 720p and 1080p, but also the bitrate of the signal. The higher the bitrate, the more picture information and better image quality. But as the bitrate increases so does the system requirements, which makes it tough to read the component manufacturers’ specifications. Intel has claimed that its new integrated chipset GN40 can do 1080p playback, but it has had to explain this more thoroughly by saying that it can not handle 1080p Blu-ray movies.
The Blu-ray format uses much higher bitrates than for Internet-published 1080p material, which is just too much to handle for the GN40 chip. Intel has the following to say;
“GN40 is designed to do 1080P HD playback for typical broadband internet content; it is not designed to enable full Blu-ray capability where the bitrates and demands of multi-layer content are significantly higher than that of internet HD content.”
Even though Intel has upgraded the graphics of its latest GN40 chipset it is not enough to handle Blu-ray. At the same time we’re wondering how many GN40-based systems that will actually be used to play Blu-ray, or even 1080p material. Nettops is perhaps closest at hand, but recent reports state that even NVIDIA’s Ion has problems with Blu-ray playback together with the weak Atom processor. NVIDIA claims that these results do not match its own test results though.
