ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime & NVIDIA Tegra 3 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 1, 2011 1:00 AM ESTVideo Playback: Blu-ray Quality in a Tablet
One of the biggest issues with Tegra 2 based tablets and smartphones is a limitation that prevented hardware accelerated decode of any high profile H.264 video content. You could still decode the video but the additional stages of the decode process were left to run on the CPU, which in turn resulted in substantially lower battery life. NVIDIA has completely addressed the problem with the Tegra 3's video decoder, which is now capable of decoding 1080p H.264 high profile streams at up to 40Mbps.
The Honeycomb video player (Gallery app) will play .mkv files by default but if you want to throw on a .m2ts file you'll need to grab a third party player. DICE Player for Android supports Tegra 3's hardware acceleration, making it a good option if you want broader file compatibility.
Android File Transfer won't push over a file greater than 4GB so the first thing I tried was ripping a portion of A Quantum of Solace (BD) and sending over a 40Mbps High Profile 1080p MKV of it. The resulting 10 minute segment was 2.8GB in size and played beautifully on the Prime. There were no dropped frames and no hiccups, it just worked.
External NTFS volumes are supported and the sdcard file system supports files greater than 4GB in size, so I copied a 15GB 1080p Blu-ray rip of A Quantum of Solace from a USB stick to the Prime. I had to use DICE Player to get audio but otherwise the clip just worked. The biggest pain was copying the huge file across, but it'd be quicker and less painful than a re-encode on most systems.
To really test my luck I threw a few of our media streaming test files at the Prime. Our 720p60 test file worked perfectly, while our 1080p60 test case was mostly smooth with the exception of occasional slowdowns. I tried playing back a 1080p30 VC1 file however I couldn't get it to play back with hardware acceleration. Some of the more exotic combinations of features and file types wouldn't work, although I suppose that could be the fault of the playback software.
As far as I can tell, Tegra 3 and the Eee Pad Transformer Prime in particular are capable of playing back 1080p24 Blu-ray class video. Total NAND capacity is the only thing limiting us from just dumping a raw Blu-ray rip onto a tablet and playing that directly. Pretty much any HD rip you make yourself or find online will likely work. You may still need to invest in a good third party player to ensure things like subtitles are properly supported however.
I'm pleased with the state of video on the Prime. It's not HTPC level, but we can finally play really good quality video on an Android tablet. I suspect it'll be one more generation before we get tablets (and associated software) that will just play anything you throw at them.
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steven75 - Saturday, December 3, 2011 - link
If you want the best tablet for your grandmother, shouldn't you be making decisions based on her needs and not yours?SydneyBlue120d - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Anand, do You think the Dual Core Snapdragon S4 will be able to beat the Quad core Tegra3? Thnx :)A5 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
As with any core-based discussion, it depends on what you're doing.tipoo - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Yeah, depends on how well optimized applications are for multicore. In most cases I'd bet a fast dual core would beat a slower quad.tipoo - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
If I'm not mistaken, Honeycomb doesn't have GPU acceleration on all windows by default like ICS will, and ICS will also have better multicore optimization. I'd like to see some benchmarks on the Prime after ICS.HighTech4US - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I second this request.SydneyBlue120d - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Another question: Any info about the audio chip? I mean: Can we expect wolfson Galaxy S quality? Tnx!Willhouse - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Why is the cost drifting up instead of down? The whole appeal of the original transformer was that is was "comparable" in quality but $100 less than other quality tablets. Those of us who are mildly interested in tablets, but can't stomach the costs, aren't going to rush out to buy this even if it is the best android tablet. Is there a large tablet enthusiast market that needs the absolute best hardware at all times?Sorry if this was mentioned - I was immediately outraged and didn't read all the comments.
Roland00Address - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
The Transformer Prime has 32 and 64gb for the internal storage (with micro sd expansion). Note the base model is not 16gb.32gb
499 Transformer Prime
599 Ipad 2
64gb
599 Transformer Prime
699 Ipad 2.
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If you want to get a tegra 2 tablet cheaper than 400 you should be looking at the winter sales on such products, it may not be the asus transformer but it is stlil a tegra 2 honeycomb tablet. No one is going to release a better product cheaper than there old gen, in a cut throat market with decreasing margins unless that product has serious competition.
Kegetys - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Is it correct that it doesn't come with 3G (or 4G) connectivity at all? I'm so used to being able to be connected almost anywhere with both my cellphone and laptop with zero hassle that being restricted to WLAN only would be quite a limitation for a mobile device like this.Also, seriously Asus, why cant you have those beautiful IPS screens available for laptops as well?