There is absolutely zero problem in playing any
HD video on a PC. You just need a decent video card.
The resolution itself in not an issue; sufficient resolution was available 10-15 years ago as a routine matter.
Well, assuming you have a player that can play it; typically you need the latest Media Player which implies WinXP and not Win2000 etc. Or some other media player; there are loads of them.
Likewise there is no problem is setting up a really impressive shop demo. The shops use a box basically containing a PC, a DVD player, and a high end video card. One can't get a 2 hour HD movie on a DVD but they don't need to; their demos are only minutes long.
The salesman will even tell you it's coming off a blue-ray DVD player...
The other day I walked all the way down Tottenham Court Road, to be fed all kinds of bu11sh1t, and not one shop had an
HD DVD player of any kind, nor did they have any imminently arriving.
The issue, as I mentioned before, is playing back copy protected material. On HD, the decryption has to be done
inside the display device. Anything else is a cheat. Which is not to say many people will notice when feeding analog video to their £1500 "HD" screens.
The cam I have, HDR-HC1
http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content...HC1-Review.htm
is very good but poor for moving images. The image movement gets very jagged; a bit like early 100Hz-processed TVs were on anything that was moving fast.
You do need a really top-end PC to transfer the data from the cam though. It has to use XP, 3HGz+, 1GB RAM, SATA HD (pref 10k RPM), and I use Pinnacle 10 (very basic but does what I need). I had to take my boys' gaming PC and put in the fastest SATA HD I could get
