Thursday, June 16, 2011

Samsung Chromebook Series 5

Samsung Chromebook Series 5 Review & Rating | PCMag.com

There have been some improvements since Google debuted Chrome OS in the CR-48. For one, Flash support, particularly high-definition videos from YouTube and Hulu, has reaped the benefits of hardware acceleration. Videos played back smoothly and lag-free for the most part, but I would have liked Chrome OS to default to a better video quality than 360p . You have to manually adjust to a higher quality setting. When I say HD support, I really mean 720p max (1080p videos choked in YouTube).

A new media player is also included with Chrome OS plays back actual video and music files, as opposed to streaming them from a Web-based service like Amazon's Cloud Player, Pandora, Slacker, etc. But it's very primitive and the media files will have to come from an external device, such as a USB storage devices or an SD card (through the 4-in-1 media card slot). Chrome OS recognizes external storage devices almost immediately, and you browse through files and folders like you would with Windows. The media player handled 1080p MP4 video files and most audio formats very well, even those that were encoded at high bit-rates. But it also left out a bunch of video formats: The media player isn't compatible with mpeg, AVI, WMV video files, and certainly not Blu-ray.


Video is the future! It's one of the few things I am sure of.

  You would think Chrome OS out the gate would focus on that first and foremost.  Everything else being far easier and less demanding other the maybe 3D graphics rendering.

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