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1080p & Macbook

N

Nick012

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 28, 2007
142
0
I searched the forums but I didn't really find anything (didn't look too hard though).
​
My question is about how well the Macbook handles 1080p video. I don't really watch 1080p videos at the moment but I want to make sure the laptop I buy will be future proof. Does it drop frames or cock up the lip sync or anything along those lines? The main thing I use my computer for is internet and movies so the extra £600 for a pro is a bit excessive for a dedicated graphics card.
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Also, If I were to play Age of Empires 3 or Civ 4 occasionally how can a macbook cope with them?

Thanks
 
I once tried CD (I believe) Macbook in Apple store with 1080p movie trailers and it worked fine. The new should be even better.
 
It will play 1080p fine, but would be pretty pointless because it would just downsize it to fit the screen which is 720p.
 
Awesome! I'll probably order one as soon as I can get the money into the right account (its in an NS&I savings doo dah). Thanks for the answers.:)
 
bah! cursed non imageboard system! how do i delete this duplicate post? I'm unfamiliar with message boards :eek:
 
My 2GHz CD MacBook with 2GB of RAM drops frames on 1080p x264 .mkv files like madness. It can play the apple movie trailers just fine.

You have been warned.
 
Canon 5D Mark II - 1080p

I own a mbp 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 with 4GB ram and I've recently purchased the new Canon 5D Mark II which shoots 1080p video in H.264 codec. The 5D shoots beautiful footage but more importantly, I've found it hard to edit or playback well on my mbp. I have tested the footage on VLC and Quicktime... both players will skip frames but audio will play constantly.

I took the footage to our studio and played the native/raw footage on our tower which is a quad core duo with 8 gigs of ram. No problem with editing or playing back the raw media. I wonder if I can upgrade the graphics card in my mbp? Any suggestions or thoughts?

In the meantime, I batch/downres the footage within compressor and relink the highres footage on the final export/master.

I will be previewing some 720p footage on my mbp later on tonight. Not sure what codec the footage is in but I'll let you know what I find out.

Michael
http://www.mgstudio.com
http://www.mgstudio.net
 
Depends on several factors. The container, the bitrate, etc.
For the most part I don't think you will have a problem.
h.264 can be pretty demanding though, I've never had 1080 source to try though.:eek:

I took the footage to our studio and played the native/raw footage on our tower which is a quad core duo with 8 gigs of ram. No problem with editing or playing back the raw media. I wonder if I can upgrade the graphics card in my mbp? Any suggestions or thoughts?
Click to expand...
Upgrading the graphics in a laptop is usually a lost cause. It wouldn't do any good anyway. All Nvidia 8 series and higher have h.264 acceleration. The problem is not your graphics card, the problem is that unless you have one of the new models, Apple has yet to update the drivers to use hardware decoding. Basically your CPU is doing all the lifting.
Same issue as many of the media center softwares out there like XBMC, a $40 video card will do the job, but since there's no drivers it requires a beefy dual core CPU.
 
mgstudio said:
I own a mbp 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 with 4GB ram and I've recently purchased the new Canon 5D Mark II which shoots 1080p video in H.264 codec. The 5D shoots beautiful footage but more importantly, I've found it hard to edit or playback well on my mbp. I have tested the footage on VLC and Quicktime... both players will skip frames but audio will play constantly.

I took the footage to our studio and played the native/raw footage on our tower which is a quad core duo with 8 gigs of ram. No problem with editing or playing back the raw media. I wonder if I can upgrade the graphics card in my mbp? Any suggestions or thoughts?

In the meantime, I batch/downres the footage within compressor and relink the highres footage on the final export/master.

I will be previewing some 720p footage on my mbp later on tonight. Not sure what codec the footage is in but I'll let you know what I find out.

Michael
http://www.mgstudio.com
http://www.mgstudio.net
Click to expand...

Select the 9400M graphics card (in System Preferences --> Energy Saver --> Better Battery Life).

Unfortunately, Apple has yet to release some decent drivers for the 9600M GT and for that very reason, 1080p playback is crap. On the 9400M, 1080p plays back perfectly smooth.

Reason being is that H.264 codecs are now handed over to the GPU for decoding rather than solely relying on the CPU. So, until the 9600M GT gets some decent drivers, you'll be stuck with the 9400M to get 1080p to playback fine.

720p plays back fine on both GPU's though.

It is a known issue and been reported here and all over the Apple forums.
 
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