Public service announcement
Thursday, March 12th, 2009This is geeky. Feel free to turn away now.
Ahem. Anyhow, if you're Googling to find out if you can play Blu-ray movies using a Celeron E1200 processor, as I was just the other day, then the answer is: just about. Google couldn't tell me the answer then so I'm adding to the sum of human knowledge, or something.
Details: Cerelon E1200 (stock, £30 ish), Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H (£40, includes GeForce 7100 graphics), Sony BDU-X10S (£50). Discs play, and everything looks fine, but some panning shots begin to overtax the CPU (already at 98%, both cores) and look juddery.
Stick in an E5200 instead (£60) and it runs fine – CPU at 50-60% playing Blu-ray, rising during the tricky bits. I imagine that putting in a HD-decoding video card might help the E1200 along, but that's not an option in my case.