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Can your iMac play this 4k movie trailer?
- Thread starter StephenCampbell
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Played fine on my iMac (Late 2012, 2.9 i5, 660M), except for two points where it would pause for about half a second then continue.
Between quicktime and the decoder service, took up about 100-150% of a quad core CPU.
Between quicktime and the decoder service, took up about 100-150% of a quad core CPU.
I ran this on an 2011 i5 2.7ghz iMac, 24gb ram, 512mb 6770m, with 3 screens running on Windows 7 64-bit under Bootcamp.
iMac native 2560x1440
2x 23" Cinema displays native 1920x1200
Ran with Winodws Media Player using Coreavc codecs. Ran like butter (if butter had legs and could run) all while other browsing activity was going on in the background (100+ tabs on Opera over the 3 screens).
Just to prove a point I copied the 4k trailer to another drive to exclude hdd data transfer rates as a bottleneck and ran 2 instances, 1 with WMP and the other with VLC concurrently, alternating between the 2 instances on the 2 Cinemas at 1920x1200 each and 1 on a Cinema and the other on the iMac at 2560x1440 (without stopping the trailers, just dragging and dropping). All ran like a banker at an Occupy rally.
My point is this. For the love of all that is holy & unholy stop using Quicktime. Its a complete POS. It stutters, lags, has one of the most unintuitive GUI's on a playback app known to modern OS'es. If your running under Bootcamp use Core AVC Codec (I have a Vaio P 8" pocketable netbook with an Intel Atom 1.6ghz running a 1080p movie with no stutter at the netbooks native 1680x768 and seeking is not a bother).
If your on a mac use VLC or preferably use the last non-botched version (and free) of Movist, which is 0.68, linked below. Even compared to VLC I've found it obliterates everything else out there. Clean (skinnable) interface, extremely responsive, sub support, tiny footprint and if you run multiple displays going fullscreen does not blank out the other displays. You name it, it does it and simply works.
http://code.google.com/p/movist/
iMac native 2560x1440
2x 23" Cinema displays native 1920x1200
Ran with Winodws Media Player using Coreavc codecs. Ran like butter (if butter had legs and could run) all while other browsing activity was going on in the background (100+ tabs on Opera over the 3 screens).
Just to prove a point I copied the 4k trailer to another drive to exclude hdd data transfer rates as a bottleneck and ran 2 instances, 1 with WMP and the other with VLC concurrently, alternating between the 2 instances on the 2 Cinemas at 1920x1200 each and 1 on a Cinema and the other on the iMac at 2560x1440 (without stopping the trailers, just dragging and dropping). All ran like a banker at an Occupy rally.
My point is this. For the love of all that is holy & unholy stop using Quicktime. Its a complete POS. It stutters, lags, has one of the most unintuitive GUI's on a playback app known to modern OS'es. If your running under Bootcamp use Core AVC Codec (I have a Vaio P 8" pocketable netbook with an Intel Atom 1.6ghz running a 1080p movie with no stutter at the netbooks native 1680x768 and seeking is not a bother).
If your on a mac use VLC or preferably use the last non-botched version (and free) of Movist, which is 0.68, linked below. Even compared to VLC I've found it obliterates everything else out there. Clean (skinnable) interface, extremely responsive, sub support, tiny footprint and if you run multiple displays going fullscreen does not blank out the other displays. You name it, it does it and simply works.
http://code.google.com/p/movist/
VLC under Windows uses hardware (GPU) accelerated video decoders for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2.
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VLC on Mac drops probably a few frames. You can disable this behavior in the VLC preferences.
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H.265 allows better compression and better encoding quality. From my experience, 90 percent of the HD-videos on the internet are encoded with non-optimal settings.
It plays like a slug in QT, but in VLC it's beautiful and smooth.
Just a warning, 4k is quite the resource hog. Were talking 200+ percent at certain points with an average of 150% used. For quad CPU's it should play without having to quit apps, and use like half that.
Just a warning, 4k is quite the resource hog. Were talking 200+ percent at certain points with an average of 150% used. For quad CPU's it should play without having to quit apps, and use like half that.
My Test
Machine: Early-2011 2.2 GHz Quad-Core 17“ MBP (Sandy Bridge)
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 3000 IGP (via gfxCardStatus v2.1)
Software: VLC v2.0.7 (64-Bit version) on Mac OS X 10.6.8 (64-Bit kernel)
VLC CPU time: Up to 200 % (average ≈ 170 %)
VLC was in the foreground. Some apps open, which used ≈ 50 % CPU time in the background. ≈ 1 GB of 16 GB RAM free.
VLC preferences:
(Input / Codecs ->) File caching: 3000 ms (3 seconds)
(Video ->) Drop late frames: YES
(Video ->) Skip frames: NO
(Video ->) Video output module: Mac OS X OpenGL video output
(Video ->) Scaling mode: Bicubic spline
(Advanced ->) Memory copy module: MMX memcpy
The movie should have 3168 frames (132 s * 24 fps). VLC on my machine played 3146 frames (see screenshot), without a noticeable lag or other strange effects.
QuickTime X (hardware accelerated) has difficulties with the 4K resolution. No wonder, because 2011 hardware & the OS (drivers) are not optimized for the 4K resolution.
Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge/Haswell iMacs should have no problem, if you use the appropriate software and settings.
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Plays perfectly on my iMac 27", but its a brand new maxed out model...I then played it full screen on my rMBP 13" with the HD4000 GPU, didn't miss a beat.
I haven't kept up with PC hardware, but I am up to date on the new consoles coming out this. The AMD chips they use can play 4K movies no problem, since Intel's current chips are supposed to be better than whats in the consoles I'd guess that any current iMac's should have no trouble at playing 4K movies.
2013 macbook air i5/4/128
played perfect was amazing trailer never stopped once. cpu temp was and is at 35 degrees fan didnt come on.
Laughable on Early 2009 24" iMac with iTunes or Safari - Watchable with VLC
Knowing it would likely not play well, it makes my iMac look very old when using Safari or iTunes. I could get about 5 frame every 10-15 seconds and when it did play, my CPU was at 110%. My iMac is a 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo, 8GB RAM and the GT120 256MB video card.
So I think it is safe to say my iMac cannot play 4K video using Safari or iTunes.
Jeff
** UPDATE **
I tried again using VLC and the viewing the downloaded file it is actually viewable with minimal skipping - I am very surprised. Clearly the rendering engine in VLC is much better than iTunes or Safari.
Knowing it would likely not play well, it makes my iMac look very old when using Safari or iTunes. I could get about 5 frame every 10-15 seconds and when it did play, my CPU was at 110%. My iMac is a 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo, 8GB RAM and the GT120 256MB video card.
So I think it is safe to say my iMac cannot play 4K video using Safari or iTunes.
Jeff
** UPDATE **
I tried again using VLC and the viewing the downloaded file it is actually viewable with minimal skipping - I am very surprised. Clearly the rendering engine in VLC is much better than iTunes or Safari.
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I'm thinking more like 2014 maybe 2015. I mean the MBA didn't even get retina and it's definitely doable. But no, Apple is so damn smug about their battery life.
Plus i want 5k not 4k. It's got to be double the res or its isn't retina.
I was curious about this;
MP 3.2 quad, 24GB RAM Snow Leopard 6.8 - No go with QT.
Same machine - pretty smooth with VLC.
Same machine - butter smooth on Windows 8 VLC.
Sorry for jumping on this thread so late. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend streaming the 4K trailer. Best option is to download and play in your preferred video player. VLC just released version 2.1 with better UltraHD 4K support: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/2.1.0.html
You guys probably checked already, but the video was encoded using ffmpeg libx264 using a CRF value of 18. The original source was about 1.7GB which was definitely overkill for internet consumption.
But I'm curious, how many people here actually have 4K displays to test this video on…
You guys probably checked already, but the video was encoded using ffmpeg libx264 using a CRF value of 18. The original source was about 1.7GB which was definitely overkill for internet consumption.
But I'm curious, how many people here actually have 4K displays to test this video on…
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Played it on my 13" Mid 2012 Air - i7 2.0/8GB/512GB
Used VLC and didn't have a problem, silky smooth and around 200% CPU
Used VLC and didn't have a problem, silky smooth and around 200% CPU