High Definition Media Playback on notebooks

Hello, my name is Czarek Kwasny and I'm a student of animation in Poland.

I really fell in love, when familiarized myself, with the new HD standards of the future entertainment. I suppose it's already reality in the US, but here in PL we still think in that old good PAL manner. Anyway I think it would be a great step to produce the animation in HD as it is possible nowadays. The standard PC is capable of editing the HD content in quite comfortable way. I managed to do an animation in 720p standard. It's available here: http://gfx.artivo.pl/nocnyekspres/index.html
Although I had to put a half-sized version as my bandwidth doesn't allow me to put the full 720p version.

I was thinking of getting a notebook that would be capable of displaying such HD content in real-time. I really loved HP nw8240 workstation, when I learned it has 1920x1200 capable display. That would mean I can display HD content with pixel to pixel accuracy, no resizing like when displaying on my CTR 1360x1024 display. It's quite fast and not really behind my PC (~4000 versus ~4300 in PC Mark) when it's about the power. I presume it would smoothly playback all XviD, Divx, MPEG-2 encoded HD streams including 1080 30p (1920x1080 @ 30 fps progressive), as my PC does.

The question is about forthcoming h.264 (AVC) encoding standard... It becomes slowly popular. But also consumes much more CPU power than h.263 (Divx, XViD etc.) and older generation encoding standards. I've heard it will be widely used in Blu-ray/HD-DVD. h.264 HD clips are already available at:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/
You may see how it plays on your machines . I got choppy playback and got to recode it to xvid to get it smooth. I presume that playing the files even on the nw8240 which is very powerful workstation wouldn't be easy.

Here's my question... Is there available a mobile solution that would be capable of smooth playing back the h.264 HD content in real-time? Or better wait till it becomes to be available on the market. Do you think HD-DVD/Blu-ray drives will appear soon in the notebooks or it is rather a matter of two or more years... I've also heard that ATI is going to provide GPU's that will be capable of decoding h.264 content: http://www.ati.com/products/H264.html
Do you think such solution will appear for mobile workstations too?

It would be a great advantage to me to possess a laptop that is capable of displaying audio video files of relatively small sizes and very reach content. I'm just not sure how fast such solutions will be available or maybe they are available already.

Seems to me like it's very constructive forum here . Hope you'll share some thoughts.

Thank you for the reply .

I've read the recommendations before and indeed they are quite steep. I'm very interested in investing money into a robust solution. That certainly points me to rather wait till a certain kind of hardware appears. I think I'll satisfy myself with one of the cheaper notebooks for now and gather some money until an appropriate machine becomes available.

In my case the mobile workstation would play a role of a display for my work as it's very comfortable because of its portability. I'd also like to work on it and use as an substitute for PC. Still I got the PC and looks like it'll remain my basic tool of work. On the other hand I think I'll stick with the new coding standard as soon as it becomes stable, so probably a few upgrades are in front of me in order to get the availability to work with h.264 content.

According to the language . I'm very glad to hear it, really! Thank you! Polish is of course my native/first language. If there is mastery, it would be probably the effect of reading a lot of stuff in English. The knowledge I'm trying to gain is not very accessable in Polish language. The same with interviews, articles, forums and of course user manuals. That brings a lot of new expressions I'm trying to use when it comes to write something. I also use a word processor so that it checks the spelling before I post anything . I'm thinking of installing a German version of After Effects. It may improve my skills in the language as it has done in case of English .

Yay looks like VLC does a pretty good job. I have a smooth playback of 720p clips. Cannot run 1080p well though... The playback becomes jerky and VideoLAN shuts down after few secs of playing. My configuration is: A64 3000+ (~1,9 GHz) 1 GB RAM, ATI x600 128 MB. The reason of problems may lay in the o/s: WinXP 64bit edition. I have some issues and I'm moving back to 32bit soon, I'll check how 1080 clips play. But it sounds optimistic got to check VCL on frends' laptops. Hope somebody has PentiumM.