Sony VGN-AR11S blueray laptop owners, are there any problem?

[markbigears]

Hope owners of this laptop can help, I'm about to purchase this and reading various posts on the net there seems conflicting reports of blueray film playback. I've been to various outlets and although they are selling the machine , they can't demonstrate the playback as the films are not out yet in the UK. Can anyone shed any light on this and any other issues goodor bad before I spend £1700 on one! cheers guys, Mark.

 

[nehalem]

Great laptop, beautiful screen but not designed to playback Hollywood titles - drive is on 1x and so can only read on average 36Mbps whereas the titles coming out are between 20 and 72Mpbs (potentially). But it backs up to Blu Ray brilliantly - its amazing putting a disc in the drive and being told you have 24Gb free space on a single disc.... something Qosmio owners have yet to experience......

Hope that helps

 

[Paul Mela]

I was in the same situation as you but after reading this post

http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=366451

it has put me off this laptop and got me looking into HD-DVD equpped laptops

 

[Nic Rhodes]

.... something Qosmio owners have yet to experience......

They are probably too busy watching their films

 

[Paul Mela]

Is the sony vgn-ar11s bluray region locked?

 

[rover2002]

Great laptop, beautiful screen but not designed to playback Hollywood titles - drive is on 1x and so can only read on average 36Mbps whereas the titles coming out are between 20 and 72Mpbs (potentially). But it backs up to Blu Ray brilliantly - its amazing putting a disc in the drive and being told you have 24Gb free space on a single disc.... something Qosmio owners have yet to experience......
Hope that helps

Google is your friend
http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/cmod.to?coid=-30600&seg=HHO
Will.

 

[andrewjh009]

Is the sony vgn-ar11s bluray region locked?

If its anything like the sony laptop i have then you can change the region a set number of times then your stuck at whatever region your on.

 

[nehalem]

Google is your friend
http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/cmod.to?coid=-30600&seg=HHO
Will.

Must be missing something - The Qosmio only has HD DVD-ROM with DVD burner as per your link whereas the VAIO has a Blu Ray Burner which allows you to burn 25GB of data to a disc - whats your point?

Yes the drive is unlocked.

 

[nehalem]

They are probably too busy watching their films

Good point though are there any reviews of watching movies of Qosmio?

 

[richard plumb]

Good point though are there any reviews of watching movies of Qosmio?

Didn't know The Hunchback of Notre Dame was out on HD-DVD

 

[Rasczak]

Good point though are there any reviews of watching movies of Qosmio?

One chap on the forum has the laptop and seemed to be happy with the performance.

But it backs up to Blu Ray brilliantly - its amazing putting a disc in the drive and being told you have 24Gb free space on a single disc....

Have to admit this is very tempting although I'll wait for desktop drives and slightly faster speeds first. Have you tried burning any BD-Videos yet?

 

[RobDickinson]

AFIC theres no secure HD disk movie player out yet? all the major player software requires BD or HD plugins which havnt been released?

 

[nehalem]

One chap on the forum has the laptop and seemed to be happy with the performance.


Have to admit this is very tempting although I'll wait for desktop drives and slightly faster speeds first. Have you tried burning any BD-Videos yet?

Yeah it takes bloody ages to do burn an entire disc - but I remember my first CD burner, it was burning audio discs in real-time....

 

[Ian_S]

Well Toshiba aren't without playback issues, they're just not as upfront about it...

See here...

Both camps will suffer from the same problems. Unlike the CE players, there will be no Broadcom dedicated video decoder and the laptop CPU will take most of the strain and the graphics card will be helping to offload some of the work.

Both ATI and nVidia are building in VC-1 and AVC hardware acceleration which I'm sure is not yet perfect. VC-1 probably has an advantage as it requires less raw horsepower to decode than AVC. An interesting test for someone with a Tosh would be to see how U2's Prattle and Hum compares to VC-1 titles for smoothness of playback. I have no idea how well high bitrate MPEG-2 compares to either of the above...

ATI have a good whitepaper highlighting the CPU requirements of new HD formats, it's a bit of an eyeopener especially for AVC...

 

[nehalem]

http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=3230

This article says that you can’t watch HD-DVD movies without a specific PureVideo equipped graphics card though…

I don't understand if HD-DVD is working on the Tosh why they had to remove the drive and use it with an external graphics card in a SHuttle case. Does this mean you can't watch movies on the Laptop......

 

[Ian_S]

http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=3230

This article says that you can't watch HD-DVD movies without a specific PureVideo equipped graphics card though…

I don't understand if HD-DVD is working on the Tosh why they had to remove the drive and use it with an external graphics card in a SHuttle case. Does this mean you can't watch movies on the Laptop......

I think it just means it's the only way anyone can get an HD-DVD drive into a PC... Using a PC means you can throw more CPU power at it and also use it to test more standard graphics cards rather than the somewhat bespoke stuff that you get in a laptop environment...

As far as I'm aware both the Sony and Toshiba laptops will play the respective formats movies, but the article you found really does simply back up the fact that it's early days and unlike MPEG2, much more dedicated processing is required for HD.

As I understood the article, PureVideo HD is just nVidia's name for their supplied codec for supporting HD video, AVIVO is the ATI equivalent I guess.

How long before we start seeing PC cards with the likes of Broadcom decoders built in I wonder...??

 

[markbigears]

So, Do i take it reading the threads, that you CANNOT play BD movies on them? surely this can't be right?

 

[eddgreen25]

My understanding is " It will play BR movies. But you need to update the software. Even after that the playbay on come movies will be stuttering.
For £2000 I expect better from sony

 

[Ian_S]

My understanding is " It will play BR movies. But you need to update the software. Even after that the playbay on come movies will be stuttering.
For £2000 I expect better from sony

The Sony will play HD movies as well as any other PC makers equivalent specification laptop.

The hard truth is that HD movie playback on PC's will be very painful until someone comes up with a hardware solution for video decoding, or Intel/AMD make significant MIPs gains on their CPU's. Laptops never have the fastest CPU's either so aren't the best option. They are however one of the easier ways to get an integrated solution to market as it's easier to hide what's been done. After all, no-one in either camp is going out of their way to tell PC users what they will need parts wise to build their own HTPC that is BD or HD-DVD ready... And that's almost certainly because at this point in time people aren't going to like the answer. If it was going to be easy they'd be falling over themselves to sell you the bits.

If you want decent HD disc playback in the next 12 months, buy a player.

 

[JSK87]

my ar11s jus arrived and ive put in a dvd and the screen doesnt seem spectacular in any way, in fact its awful by any video playback standards. this is surely a software/setting issue because the general desktop/background looks amazing. so wats the magic button i havent pressed, or is there some sort of resolution setting i need to change?? please help!!