Month: May 2012

One of our community members asked whether HDXPRT 2012 would support Windows 8. It certainly is one of our goals. The current beta does not work with Windows 8, however. Problems with a couple of the applications themselves prevent the current version from installing on Windows 8.

We will continue to test beta versions of HDXPRT 2012 with beta versions of Windows 8 over the coming weeks. There is rumored to be a newer beta of Windows 8 out next week and we are hoping to be able to resolve the issues in a later beta or at least by the shipping version.

Regardless, there will be multiple versions of Windows 8 before it releases later this year. We plan to release HDXPRT 2012 this summer. We assume there will be some glitches. So, we expect that we will have to release an update to HDXPRT 2012 once Windows 8 is closer to its final version.

Also, once there is a version of Windows 8 that allows publishing performance results, we plan to look at what performance differences there are between Windows 7 and Windows 8.

A quick update on the beta—we are in the process of making the DVDs and will send them out next week. We sent emails to all the community members to confirm their correct shipping addresses. If you received that email, please respond. If you haven’t received that email, please let us know. We want to make sure the DVDs actually get to you!

Bill

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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

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