We’re in the home stretch of testing the HDXPRT 2012 before releasing the beta to the community members. As is often the case, we’ve run into some issues that I want to share with you.
We’ve encountered some technical challenges in creating the 4K video playback workload that the design specification called for. We could not use the existing HDXPRT playback automation and instrumentation because Windows Media Player currently does not by default play 4K H.264 content. We tried other video players but ran into stability issues on slower systems.
These technical problems led us to step back and think about the role of video playback in HDXPRT 2012. In HDXPRT 2011, there wasn’t much differentiation between most current systems on the video playback results. The video playback tests were also a source of confusion. As I traveled and talked to users, they thought that the stars of the video playback were the primary metric, not the performance number. More generally, however, having both quality and performance numbers can be confusing.
Our plan is to remove the video playback tests from the beta. We will include them as optional inspection tests in an updated version later this year. By removing video playback from the primary tests and metrics, we’ll be able to include stressful test that won’t work on all systems while avoiding unnecessary confusion. Over time, I think we can include a number of interesting tests this way. We’d love to hear your ideas for what might be good to include that way as well as whether you think we’re making the correct call for video playback tests in HDXPRT 2012.
I will be traveling next week. Eric Hale, our project lead for HDXPRT 2012, will be writing the next blog. He will hopefully have some good news about the beta!
Bill
