Which video encoding format produces a file that uses the least laptop battery life to play back, assuming resolution is a constant. It is not as straight forward as it sounds. If a format uses much less cpu it should use less energy, right? Well what if that makes it a bigger file size too, doesn't that mean more disk activity and thus it uses even more battery life? Or is the best solution to use a format that uses the least cpu power regardless of the file size and then put that on to a ram disk if you have enough to fit it. But can you really have a pure ram disk in OS X since it often pages out the contents of ram to the hard disk? And does using a ram disk introduce extra processing that adds an additional drain on the battery?
See where I'm going with this? The rabbit hole is very deep. I think the only way to really find the answer is for someone to do some extensive empirical testing. ...but it ain't gonna be me! Anyone have any ideas about this?
See where I'm going with this? The rabbit hole is very deep. I think the only way to really find the answer is for someone to do some extensive empirical testing. ...but it ain't gonna be me! Anyone have any ideas about this?