Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Skylar. Pretty much all computers released today will be able to play the highest quality video that's available. That's play, not necessarily edit or manipulate. So theoretically you could play 4K video on a modern computer even say a MacBook Air but you wouldn't be able to see the whole image, you'd have to scale it to fit the screen. So that got me thinking, you know, how much horse power does one actually require in order to play back a DVD? Well DVD was SD, standard resolution or standard definition rather and the maximum resolution of that which was 720 pixels by 480 pixels. If you really wanted to calculate bit rates and go down that road you could, but I thought I would just look at my first laptop and think about the specs. So here I am in Wikipedia and I just looked up the PowerBook G4. So the G4 was first released in January of 2001 and it had a 400 megahertz processor and a 2X DVD ROM player. So with those minimal specs it could play back DVDs. Within just a couple years, well actually it looks like within just one year they had improved the processor speed by almost double and quadrupled the DVD read speed. So at this point, there is really no computer that you are going to come across unless you buy it used from the Salvation Army that will struggle with DVD playback, that is if it even has a DVD player. Thanks for watching. I'm Skylar.