No, it’s not a joke, but it’s not hands-down proof that Microsoft will allow it either. The Tegra platform is fully capable of 1080p playback (as you’ll hear after the jump roughly two minutes into the video), and the Zune HD has already been outed as being built on the Tegra platform. Now, with this in mind, there are still a few things holding Microsoft back from enabling 1080p video playback on Tegra: The Zune HD likely won’t have the hard drive space to store more than a few movies in full 1080p resolution, nor is there much of a point in squandering space on a 1080p film and playing it back on a reduced screen. Storing 720p and scaling it down for playback on a smaller screen while on the move makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense to do this with massive 1080p video, especially when there isn’t even much of a perceived difference in quality when outputting both 720p and 1080p to a TV. Keep in mind as well that while Tegra’s power usage is awesomely low, playing 1080p video is still more energy-expensive than playing 720p, so 1080p will also reduce battery life. The benefits v. drawbacks aren’t in favor of 1080p, but at least it’s comforting to know that the ZuneHD is capable.

The reason this matters, though, is that for those enthusiasts out there who want the capability to throw 1080p at their TVs from their Zunes, this may be nothing more than a quick hackjob to enable. If Microsoft decides to produce a high-capacity model down the road (say, 320GB), I also wouldn’t be surprised to see it officially enabled on the Zune HD by default.

As for the Tegra platform, I managed to run into two separate Tegra netbooks, one of which was throwing 720p video at a TV without any problems. Tegra itself is ridiculously tiny, and NVIDIA seems to be working quite hard to get deals with car manufacturers, smartphone makers, netbook makers, TV makers, etc. for the Tegra platform. The goal, basically, is to get Tegra embedded into anything in which it might possibly fit, which is to say, basically everything. Power usage is also amazingly low, which opens the gates for many applications.

Update: I’ve checked the specs for the two different Tegra Systems-on-Chip, and neither state support for 1080p. However, there’s clear confirmation in the video that at least one of the Tegra models is 1080p-capable, so who knows. Thanks goes to @clubdirthill for sparking a desire within me to look into the matter.

More details on everything (including the size) can be found in my video of NVIDIA’s Tegra platform, which happens to be below the fold in both vanilla and HD YouTube form.

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