Can you play HD movies on Macbook Air?

Yes, HD will play on a MacBook Air. But your limited to the screens resolution of 1280x800, enough for 720p, but not 1080p, which is 1920x1080.

VLC should be releasing an update in the near future for H264 hardware acceleration on OS X we might be able to play 1080p then at least 720p should suck less juice. I believe the air will play 1080p on windows?

mekhattak said:

thanks for the quick response man. so if I am buying it just to watch HD movies then its the same as the macbookpro 13" or 15"?

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My Rev A MacBook air played 1080p mkv files with vlc 1.1.1 smoothly. No problem at all.

You're better off with a MBP. The air lags when watching even You Tube videos after 5-10 minutes. It does play DIVX movies flawlessly but for the same money MBP is a better option. Twice the battery life too, go with SSD either way!

DiamondGCoupe said:

You're better off with a MBP. The air lags when watching even You Tube videos after 5-10 minutes. It does play DIVX movies flawlessly but for the same money MBP is a better option. Twice the battery life too, go with SSD either way!

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Hey man, im a prospective MBA buyer who's looking to pick up your 2.13ghz SSD model. Are you using the accelerated Flash GALA release?

Scorpio12345 said:

Hey man, im a prospective MBA buyer who's looking to pick up your 2.13ghz SSD model. Are you using the accelerated Flash GALA release?

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I have and can play 1080p YouTube no problem. Now is a good time to buy the Air I don't see updates until early next year when they run out of C2D chips.

Note that the MBA will display 1080p on an external display. However, when trying to display 1080p with a browser plug-in, it sometimes stutters and has problems. If you use an actual HD capable player/video, outside of a browser, it works perfectly. The Nvidia GPU is perfectly capable. Video on my 24" LED ACDs is STUNNING. I think it's better than my HD TV, as the colors are out of this world.

Apple just started allowing low-level API access to the GPU's resources. This means that in time the MBA will actually do hardware decoding of h.264. Even in browsers, the MBA's HD video playback capabilities will get better fast. I have noticed Apple improving GPU drivers almost constantly with each 10.6.X update. The MBA truly does just keep getting better and better without any physical changes.

Airforcekid said:

I have and can play 1080p YouTube no problem. Now is a good time to buy the Air I don't see updates until early next year when they run out of C2D chips.

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For about 5 minutes. Then you have to shut it down to cool off. Go with a MBP.