• Battery / video decoding
    6 replies, posted
Hey gang. I've installed linux mint on my acer timeline 5810T to replace windows 7 for a bit of a change and am mostly happy with it. A few niggles though. Firstly, the battery life under linux is shite. On Windows I get just shy of 9 hours, with linux I only get about 6.5. What's going on here? The CPU is barely used most of the time, powertop isn't helpful (all it says is the web browser is stopping the disk idling constantly and nothing else). Not sure but I'm pretty sure the fan is running more than it was under windows too. Also, I seem to have major issues playing back 720p video under linux. Again on windows it was fine. What should I do to diagnose these issues?
Windows probably has hardware acceleration. If you watch Flash 10.1, it has hardware acceleration with GPU. VLC has hardware acceleration. WMP has hardware acceleration. As far as battery life, I can't remember why the battery life in Linux sucks but I think it has something to do with something called the scheduler. I believe it's a part of the kernel, but I literally have no damn clue what its job is.
Linux battery life is generally slightly worse than windows, which really does suck :( As for 720p playback, you might want to try a few different decoders as some outperform others on certain system setups.
I dunno if you can call 2.5 hours "slightly worse" but ok I guess nothing can be done about this. I have a very weak cpu so it might be my integrated video card making a difference in video playback yeah. Why doesn't linux do this?
[QUOTE=Catdaemon;25872294]I dunno if you can call 2.5 hours "slightly worse" but ok I guess nothing can be done about this. I have a very weak cpu so it might be my integrated video card making a difference in video playback yeah. Why doesn't linux do this?[/QUOTE] Only recently have ATI/Nvidia/Intel been opening up their graphics drivers for Linux, so developers haven't really had a long time to get hardware acceleration working well.
And hardware acceleration is (I heard) pretty easy to do in Windows (if you know what you're doing, of course).
If you're up for some fun, you can build a new kernel with Dynamic Ticks and HPET enabled. That will help with battery life, but isn't going to give you back the 2.5hrs.
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