Some friend of mine told me that if I play video of HD quality at least *720p format he will buy my computer for aprox 1000 us dollars.

I have here Pentium III Tualatin 1,26 ghz@ 1,5ghz, with 1,5 gb of SDRam at 158Mhz. He was trying to convince me that my computer will not be capable to play video at this quality.

So I downloaded one HD video from gamespot. Format was WMV (WVC1) 1280x720 at 30 FPS.

When opened it with Windows Media Player 9, codec was downloaded and after reboot i was able to play this video with no trouble at requested resolution (720).

The trick lies in Video Mixing Renderer. While Windows XP is using VMR9 by default the same computer will be not able to play video, because VMR9 is using much more processor. Windows 9x is using VMR7 by default so any rendering can be done with less hardware requirements.

So if somebody says that windows 98 cannot survive future, i may say that i have proof that windows XP is directly designed to have bloated requirements

Right.

Ever tried to run Windows 98 on a Core 2 Duo and with PCI-E II?

For the fun I've had seriously tried to get Windows 98 se on my machine last spring and it won't work. It never boots up and it will hang on the networkcard. I couldn't solve it.

XP is bloated, we know, but what is bloatware?
On this earth there're millions of people who wants XP to run. For every individual human there are another wishes in using a Windows version, rather the version doen't matter at all. The term bloatware is in your eyes not the term for someone else or reversed.
If Microsoft has a huge server with all the components on it and you install Windows, then connect to that server I ask how fast it is. On every day the're millions of new fresh setups and that server should be a huge one. That is the reason XP came with some 'usefull' applications.

We don't talk about Vista. At this day Vista is become a standard and, yes, know we may use the term bloatware. There're enough open source sollutions available in 2008 and neither in 1995, 1998 and 2001 or?

I use Vista here

if we are looking for difference between software and bloatware lets look at windows 98Se and Windows ME. system is same, but there are some new features which are not intended for power users but mainly for common users. The same difference is between windows 2000 and windows XP.

Video Mixing Renderer 7 was designed to use graphical acceleration for video rendering. Nothing less nothing more.
Performance 1280x720 - 43 fps on my system. Video had 60 fps.

Video Mixing Renderer 9 was designed to use Shader program to improve video quality by filtering. This filtering is done by processor or graphic card.
Performance 1280x720 - 8-9 fps on same system with same movie.

But if we ask question where is realtime postprocessing during playback necessary, we shall find an answer, that these settings are most useful for low and mid quality video, for PAL/Secam quality, and for MPEG4 based compression to supress negative side effects of interlacing, noise and compression.

HD videos dont have those side effects - at least those i have seen and it was not upscaled Mpeg. Therefore is not necessary to use DX9 renderer, and it seems there is no reason for that.

One guy told me that he upgraded his P4 to dualcore because he was trying to view HD movies. With VMR9 of course. Well if there is so big difference only in default renderer i would reconsider buying new computer with newer system, when only few switches in Media Player Classic will grant me an acess to HD quality with same hardware i already have.