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SD Cards and multimedia playback

F

FennecTheFox

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 6, 2005
Messages
80
Hi

I have a fairly straight-forward question about SD cards.
My laptop has an SD card reader and being that I have a very small SSD in this laptop I was considering expanding my storage via SD card.

What I'm wondering: Will I be able to play HD movies 1080p up to 4K stutter-free from an SD card?
If so, what read/write should I go for?

According to a spec sheet it's a 3-in-1 so I can read SD/SDHC/SDXC.

Thanks.
 
General rule is to avoid getting anything less than a Class 10 or UHS1 card when it comes to high def media. Both reading and writing.

However, the reader in your laptop may be the bottleneck and not the card itself. Depends on whether the reader was built from quality or generic parts. A poor quality controller for an SD Card reader will never be able to provide the throughput needed regardless of how fast the SD Card itself is capable of giving it.
 
Another factor is the codec of the movies you are playing. Higher levels of compression should result in less reads from the SD card.

I have not done this personally (using SD cards), but I have played 1080P x264 movies from USB flash drives, even slow ones, many times without issue.
 
techrat said:
General rule is to avoid getting anything less than a Class 10 or UHS1 card when it comes to high def media. Both reading and writing.

However, the reader in your laptop may be the bottleneck and not the card itself. Depends on whether the reader was built from quality or generic parts. A poor quality controller for an SD Card reader will never be able to provide the throughput needed regardless of how fast the SD Card itself is capable of giving it.
Click to expand...

I see, yeah I have a Dell XPS 13, so I wouldn't imagine the reader would be terrible?
How would I find out?
 
GotNoRice said:
Another factor is the codec of the movies you are playing. Higher levels of compression should result in less reads from the SD card.

I have not done this personally (using SD cards), but I have played 1080P x264 movies from USB flash drives, even slow ones, many times without issue.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's a good point.
I considered buying a high storage USB flash drive months ago. Any read/write you'd recommend?

I suppose the reason I was considering the SD card route is because I only have 2x USB ports in my laptop and they are always used up, so figured I may as well try to make use of the SD card slot.
 
I've played 4K video from a GoPro Hero 4 Black off of the SD card that recorded it in my USB 2.0 card reader. Played fine.
The data rate is pretty high at 60,118 kbps.
gopro-4k-data-rate.jpg
 
Last edited:
Zepher said:
The data rate is pretty high at 60,118 kbps.
Click to expand...

60,118Kbps is almost exactly 60Mbps which is 7.5MB/sec. Well within the capabilities of a (honest and true) Class 10 card. By this point, if the reader's not a problem... it's your system's ability to decompress/render that much video data at once.

Older iMacs in the studio are able to do it so I doubt a relatively modern laptop will have much of an issue.
 
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