How To Have An 18 Movie Marathon In 2 Hours

Today my 3.5 year old was restless and scratchy so I started playing Shrek on my PC for him while I was updating Mood Stones. I saw the other 2 Shrek movies sitting there on my media hard drive and thought I'd try a little experiment.

What you see here is a screenshot of 18 movies playing at the same time on my dual monitor setup (2 x 4:3 CRTs). The system tray shows I had 21 windows open but the other three were hidden underneath somewhere and I couldn't get to their play buttons. My PC had no problems playing all 18 movies and even mixed the various audio streams out through to my 5.1 speakers with the AC3 (Dolby Digital) outputs even mixing correctly. I was a little surprised with that one. This would sure be an easy way to have an 18 film marathon... you'd be done in a few hours.

My next test was to see how my PC would handle multiple HD videos. I kicked in all 6 Star Wars movies which I just happen to have in 720p and they played with no troubles at all, again with the 6 distinct audio streams being mixed nicely.



(click for full size images, excuse the JPEG compression)



Just a few years ago you'd have struggled to play one high definition video now you can play six HD or 18 SD videos ACROSS THE NETWORK all at once and still have spare CPU for solitaire in another window.

I was running low on free RAM with the 18 videos playing (plus 3 more loaded ready to play) but the 6 HD videos didn't seem to worry Vista much. When I install Windows 7 on my PC I'll have to retry my experiment, especially seeing as MPEG4 decoding is now part of the OS.

FYI, my hardware specs:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (not overclocked)
RAM: 4GB
LAN: 1,000Mb/1Gb Ethernet
OS: Windows Vista 64
Video: ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Audio: Onboard Realtek HD Audio
Codec: K-Lite Standard pack using WMP Classic.