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Geert76

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 28, 2014
1,815
3,591
the Netherlands
Will the new rMB be streaming easily MKV movies (average 8GB, 1080P) to my Apple TV3?

Or you think it will go with stuttering or hickups?
I have a very good WiFi connection at home

thanks in advance!
 

Rigby

macrumors 603
Aug 5, 2008
6,210
10,148
San Jose, CA
Will the new rMB be streaming easily MKV movies (average 8GB, 1080P) to my Apple TV3?

Or you think it will go with stuttering or hickups?
It's hard to say without some testing. Apple TV does not support the MKV container format, so you cannot just stream the original video content to it. You'll have to use either:

1) Airplay mirroring; this works by doing on-the-fly compression of the entire screen content and streaming that to the ATV. It will probably not run at full framerate on the Macbook (even more powerful hardware struggles with that).

2) Streaming software such as Beamer that can repackage and if necessary transcode the video stream on-the-fly into a format the ATV understands. Depending on the content of the MKV (codec, resolution etc.) the CPU may be too slow to transcode the video without quality degradation. If your MKVs already use H.264 encoding and Beamer is smart enough to recognize that (and not transcode), it will probably work fine.

I'd suggest you wait until somebody has tested it before making a decision.
 

Rigby

macrumors 603
Aug 5, 2008
6,210
10,148
San Jose, CA
ah, thats a great tip! thanks
Remember that this only works if the codecs in your MKV files are H.264 for the video and AAC and/or AC3 for audio. MKV can contain many other formats as well.

If the codecs do match, another alternative to very easily remux MKVs into MP4s is ffmpeg. It takes just one command:

ffmpeg -i movie.mkv -vcodec copy -acodec copy movie.mp4
 

Geert76

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 28, 2014
1,815
3,591
the Netherlands
Remember that this only works if the codecs in your MKV files are H.264 for the video and AAC and/or AC3 for audio. MKV can contain many other formats as well.

If the codecs do match, another alternative to very easily remux MKVs into MP4s is ffmpeg. It takes just one command:

ffmpeg -i movie.mkv -vcodec copy -acodec copy movie.mp4

Thanks Rigby! #
 

flyinmac

macrumors 68040
Sep 2, 2006
3,579
2,465
United States
Handbrake handles converting files to MP4 for Apple TV quite well, and is also free.

I've used it to convert AVI files and Mkv files to MP4 with functioning audio. Other titles either dropped frames or lost audio or both.

Handbrake is straight forward, simple, no command lines, etc.
 

Queen6

macrumors G4
Handbrake handles converting files to MP4 for Apple TV quite well, and is also free.

I've used it to convert AVI files and Mkv files to MP4 with functioning audio. Other titles either dropped frames or lost audio or both.

Handbrake is straight forward, simple, no command lines, etc.

Equally it consumes a vast amount of CPU and can equally consume a lot of time. If your MKV is H264, AC3 etc, Sublar will repackage the video & audio in a fraction of the time.

I use and like HandBrake a lot, equally I prefer to get through things a efficiently as possible.

Q-6
 

Geert76

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 28, 2014
1,815
3,591
the Netherlands
thanks for the Handbrake and Sublar tips! :)

Hopefully the new retina Macbook can handle my mkv files with the Beamer app, if not, I'll use either Handbrake or Sublar
 

cbautis2

macrumors 6502a
Aug 17, 2013
894
1,106
Equally it consumes a vast amount of CPU and can equally consume a lot of time. If your MKV is H264, AC3 etc, Sublar will repackage the video & audio in a fraction of the time.

I use and like HandBrake a lot, equally I prefer to get through things a efficiently as possible.

Q-6

Handbrake is perfect for iMacs but it makes macbooks as hot as an oven. I really hope Handbrake will use quicksync in the future so we wouldn't need raw CPU power.
 

mi7chy

macrumors G4
Oct 24, 2014
10,495
11,155
Should be able to. I can stream 1080p MKV from Thinkpad Helix2 with more power efficient Core M 5Y10 with Videostream Chrome extension to Chromecast perfectly.
 

mi7chy

macrumors G4
Oct 24, 2014
10,495
11,155
Streaming a MKV to Chromecast and it's using between mostly 2% of 800MHz and spikes to 15% of 1.5GHz. While streaming can locally play full screen 1080p YouTube in Chrome fine at the same time.
 

alec6542

macrumors regular
Jan 16, 2012
111
2
Beamer is the only practical solution. Just right click the mkv file, select open with Beamer, and that's it, the video plays on your television. In fact I set up a keyboard shortcut "cmd B" which automatically opens a highlighted file in Beamer. No need to waste all that time converting the large mkv file to m4v and having to mess with iTunes. Beamer is awesome, and it would be nice if Apple natively implemented such a feature.
 
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