.mkv playback Snow Leopard GPU acceleration

[toebs]

Main reason i got Snow Leopard was for the GPU acceleration for 1080p video playback, but quick time X doesnt support mkv fileformat, so is there any way to play mkv with GPU acceleration?

 

[broken-chaos]

Very unlikely. If the MKV video stream is in h.264 and you use Perian + QuickTime Player, it might use hardware acceleration where available, but I can't be sure on that at all.

Also note that the H.264 hardware acceleration is only currently available on the Nvidia 9400M chipset, not on any of the others.

 

[toebs]

thanks for the answer.
Will the same apply to x.264 as h.264?

 

[nurv2600]

Very unlikely. If the MKV video stream is in h.264 and you use Perian + QuickTime Player, it might use hardware acceleration where available, but I can't be sure on that at all.

Also note that the H.264 hardware acceleration is only currently available on the Nvidia 9400M chipset, not on any of the others.

Actually, any OpenCL-capable GPU (such as the 9600GT found in the high end MBPs) will support hardware decoding. I've tested this on both my 9400M and 9600GT (MBP 2.66C2D, 4GB RAM, 512MB VRAM 9600GT, 256MB shared VRAM 9400M).

EDIT: yes, h.264 and x264 are the same codec.

 

[SPUY767]

Main reason i got Snow Leopard was for the GPU acceleration for 1080p video playback, but quick time X doesnt support mkv fileformat, so is there any way to play mkv with GPU acceleration?

MKV isn't a format, it's a container. 90% of the HD .mkv's that you see floating around are going to be encoded in MPEG4, so rename the file from .mkv to .mp4 and quicktime should play it without a problem.

 

[Infrared]

Actually, any OpenCL-capable GPU (such as the 9600GT found in the high end MBPs) will support hardware decoding. I've tested this on both my 9400M and 9600GT (MBP 2.66C2D, 4GB RAM, 512MB VRAM 9600GT, 256MB shared VRAM 9400M).

How did you test that? Would be interesting to know, thanks.

EDIT: yes, h.264 and x264 are the same codec.

H.264 is a standard. x264 is a codec.

 

[Transporteur]

MKV isn't a format, it's a container. 90% of the HD .mkv's that you see floating around are going to be encoded in MPEG4, so rename the file from .mkv to .mp4 and quicktime should play it without a problem.

Was the renaming just a guess or does that actually work for you?

I create .mkv files with makeMKV on a Windows box, but to actually play them with QuickTime X (in order to get the hardware acceleration), they have to be converted to MPEG4 with Handbrake.
Renaming does not work since QuickTime X can't open those files.

 

[JavierP]

Main reason i got Snow Leopard was for the GPU acceleration for 1080p video playback, but quick time X doesnt support mkv fileformat, so is there any way to play mkv with GPU acceleration?

You can change the container from MKV to MP4 using Subler (free tool). It does the container conversion in about 30s in my machine.
http://code.google.com/p/subler/
If the MKV is already encoded in h264, you can view the movie in QT without using any external drivers (Perian, etc)