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1080p movies on Macbook pro?

J

Juan TS

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 3, 2011
72
2
London, UK
I love to watch Full HD movies on my Samsung LED tv. The only problem is that my PC (Toshiba A300 1|4) lags when playing 1080p, sometimes the image stops briefly and that is really annoying. Only playing 720p this won't happen.

I've seizing a Macbook pro, but I have not bought it yet because my pc is still OK, unless for this detail, so my question is: will a new macbook pro 13" play 1080p movies without lagging and with "perfect" image? and is there quality loss when using the mini-DVI to HDMI adapter when playing Full HD movies on my tv?
 
It will play full HD without problem hands down.
But if you want REAL 1080P HD, buy a 17in.
Nothing can beat the 1920x1200 display.
Now thats full HD
 
No 13" has no AG but that has nothing to do with 1080p playback anyway.
1080p is something every notebook even netbooks can do without any problem as long as there is some hardware acceleration used by the player.
Even the Intel GPU of the last generation (2010) which everybody kept saying is crap and some idiots say the same of the new one still, could playback two Full HD 1080p streams at the same time.
Full HD playback was a problem once it was all software and all the load on the CPU but it is not anymore for a couple years now. CPUs sold the last 2 years are fast enough to handle it in software and every GPU even the slowest ones have hardware acceleration.
What many people also don't seem to understand is that hardware acceleration of h264 playback has nothing to do with a fast graphic card. It is a seperate specialized unit called UVD by AMD and differently by Intel and Nvidia. Your HD 3000 GPU can playback videos as fluent as the most expensive GPU you can buy for a Desktop today.
 
dusk007 said:
No 13" has no AG but that has nothing to do with 1080p playback anyway.
1080p is something every notebook even netbooks can do without any problem as long as there is some hardware acceleration used by the player.
Even the Intel GPU of the last generation (2010) which everybody kept saying is crap and some idiots say the same of the new one still, could playback two Full HD 1080p streams at the same time.
Full HD playback was a problem once it was all software and all the load on the CPU but it is not anymore for a couple years now. CPUs sold the last 2 years are fast enough to handle it in software and every GPU even the slowest ones have hardware acceleration.
What many people also don't seem to understand is that hardware acceleration of h264 playback has nothing to do with a fast graphic card. It is a seperate specialized unit called UVD by AMD and differently by Intel and Nvidia. Your HD 3000 GPU can playback videos as fluent as the most expensive GPU you can buy for a Desktop today.
Click to expand...

Wou, thanks.
But with this you mean that I can play 1080p movies fluently? and that the question lies on the software I use to play? (I use vlc, btw)
 
Juan TS said:
Wou, thanks.
But with this you mean that I can play 1080p movies fluently? and that the question lies on the software I use to play? (I use vlc, btw)
Click to expand...

You can play 1080p with any program (including VLC) on the 13' as well as the others.
 
No worries, the screenshot is on the 1280x800 13in screen, but you get the idea..

The window is at full movie res, it just goes off screen quite a bit :)
 

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AFPoster said:
wow Quicktime 7...
Click to expand...

ha, I'm a stick in the mud with QT7, i'm yet to find anything better than pro, free or otherwise.
Mainly used now for importing fraps files, which get split into 4GB chunks, and exporting as one file. Makes it much easier to manage later.


But, used in this case because QTX doesn't show the current playing FPS, only the file FPS, and my VLC install has only played back audio since Lion...
 
Juan TS said:
Wou, thanks.
But with this you mean that I can play 1080p movies fluently? and that the question lies on the software I use to play? (I use vlc, btw)
Click to expand...

Yes. I only watch 720p as the size difference is insane (along with the fact that I have a 13 inch screen) so there's no reason for "me" to watch 1080p; however, I can easily do it and multitask at the same time.
 
Juan TS said:
(I use vlc, btw)
Click to expand...
I also use VLC. It is just a brilliant player than can do everything and anything. However it does not have the best hardware acceleration but it has enough to play 1080p fluently what ever system you have. If you want to save battery life Quicktime and Windows Media player 12 offer maximum acceleration but it really only matters if you need maximum battery life.
 
beige matchbox said:
No worries, the screenshot is on the 1280x800 13in screen, but you get the idea..

The window is at full movie res, it just goes off screen quite a bit :)
Click to expand...

Thanks! It looks very nice!

dusk007 said:
I also use VLC. It is just a brilliant player than can do everything and anything. However it does not have the best hardware acceleration but it has enough to play 1080p fluently what ever system you have. If you want to save battery life Quicktime and Windows Media player 12 offer maximum acceleration but it really only matters if you need maximum battery life.
Click to expand...

Yes, vlc is really great!, but can Quicktime read mkv.? As far as I know Windows Media Player can't, but I don't touch it for years.

Btw, is Media Player Classic good? Better than vlc? with better acceleration? or just another program which can read a lot of movie types without modifying them?
 
dusk007 said:
I also use VLC. It is just a brilliant player than can do everything and anything. However it does not have the best hardware acceleration but it has enough to play 1080p fluently what ever system you have. If you want to save battery life Quicktime and Windows Media player 12 offer maximum acceleration but it really only matters if you need maximum battery life.
Click to expand...

But Quicktime and Windows Media Player also demand a better hardware to plaza the 1080p smoothly (no problems with the 13inch MBP btw i have the same one.
 
Just consider that any current generation smartphone (iOS/Android) can play back 1080p content and you then you'll realise that any decent computer made in the last 3 years can play back just about anything.
 
maril1111 said:
But Quicktime and Windows Media Player also demand a better hardware to plaza the 1080p smoothly (no problems with the 13inch MBP btw i have the same one.
Click to expand...
How do you define better hardware. Just about anything sold in the last years comes with good enough hardware. I am just saying that those players have less CPU utilization than VLC.
VLC though plays everything and can do all kinds of stuff to the video. Aspect ration change, crop nothing special but it really helps sometimes and WMP or QT suck here.

QT cannot play mkv by default but with perian it can. WMP I am not sure but in case it cannot there is enough mkv demuxing stuff around to give it the ability. mkv is quite widely used these days I wouldn't be surprised if WMP 12 already understands it by default, I know mine does but I probably installed a bunch of mkv tools and it didn't work before. Just typ mkv in google. You will fine a page with everything you need to make it work.

But keep using VLC most of the time it is just the best player and has no trouble playing back everything even if it demands a bit more work from the CPU.

Mediaplayer classic is the same as VLC doesn't really gain you anything afaik.
 
Update did a little research and testing.

Conclusion in OSX VLC is still your best bet when playing mkv.

According to the Web VLC supports hardware acc. quite well already in Windows and Linux but not OSX which is Apple's fault what else. There are times you really hate Apple for forcing everybody to use their own crap of software or not offering decent features.

Now with Perian Quicktime does play mkv BUT it seems to use its own software filters and the results are bad.
I tried a 1080p movie ripped not the heaviest about 10GB file. VLC hat a CPU utilization form about 53% in dark slow moving scenes to 80 and 90+% in brighter and faster scenes. Quicktime was at 80-90% already in the easy scenes. Along with the poor mkv support (you cannot fastforward properly because it takes for ever to suck in the whole index) and the really mediocre usability of quicktime I recommend to stick with VLC unless you really do run stuff that quicktime supports by default like mp4 or whatever container Apple actually supports.
BluRay needs a lot more CPU power but you cannot play those on OSX anyway and every Core 2 Duo shouldn't have a problem to play anything at 24 fps with VLC.

Apperantly there is an API now to access all the decode functionality in OSX since 10.6.3 but it nobody found time to add it to VLC yet afaik. Maybe VLC 1.2.1 will sport it.
 
dusk007 said:
Update did a little research and testing.

Conclusion in OSX VLC is still your best bet when playing mkv.

According to the Web VLC supports hardware acc. quite well already in Windows and Linux but not OSX which is Apple's fault what else. There are times you really hate Apple for forcing everybody to use their own crap of software or not offering decent features.

Now with Perian Quicktime does play mkv BUT it seems to use its own software filters and the results are bad.
I tried a 1080p movie ripped not the heaviest about 10GB file. VLC hat a CPU utilization form about 53% in dark slow moving scenes to 80 and 90+% in brighter and faster scenes. Quicktime was at 80-90% already in the easy scenes. Along with the poor mkv support (you cannot fastforward properly because it takes for ever to suck in the whole index) and the really mediocre usability of quicktime I recommend to stick with VLC unless you really do run stuff that quicktime supports by default like mp4 or whatever container Apple actually supports.
BluRay needs a lot more CPU power but you cannot play those on OSX anyway and every Core 2 Duo shouldn't have a problem to play anything at 24 fps with VLC.

Apperantly there is an API now to access all the decode functionality in OSX since 10.6.3 but it nobody found time to add it to VLC yet afaik. Maybe VLC 1.2.1 will sport it.
Click to expand...

That was really useful and instructive, thanks!

With all that explanation what I did was deleting programs on the Windows Task Manager and then 1080p played fluently on VLC. It uses like 40% of the CPU.
Also tried WMV with downloaded codecs, but image was a bit worse. So I'm staying with VLC.

:D
 
Juan TS said:
That was really useful and instructive, thanks!

With all that explanation what I did was deleting programs on the Windows Task Manager and then 1080p played fluently on VLC. It uses like 40% of the CPU.
Also tried WMV with downloaded codecs, but image was a bit worse. So I'm staying with VLC.

:D
Click to expand...

I play 1080p Bluray rips on my 2008 Macbook and 2011 13" Macbook Pro and neither one has any problems playing them. It does trash battery life though, as the CPU is used more, hardware acceleration or not. If you see any stuttering or sluggishness, it might be because of the hard drive not being able to read back enough of the high-bit-rate video fast enough.
 
hormelmeatcompa said:
, it might be because of the hard drive not being able to read back enough of the high-bit-rate video fast enough.
Click to expand...
No. Usual Web Rips are 3 - 8Mb/s have never really downloaded anything more. Blurays have the highest bandwidths at around 30Mb/s. That is still less than 4MByte/s which is absolutely no problem at all for HDDs that read 60-120 MB/s. If you have stuttering it is because it all runs software and the CPU isn't strong enough.
 
I really don't care much for VLC, never have. On a Windows platform I've always preferred MPC (Media Player Classic). VLC's only real advantage is that it's codec friendly but the way how it renders subtitles to the way it deinterlaces video is absolutely horrible.

For the Mac platform I prefer to use Mplayer Extended OSX. Not only does the picture quality look better but the post-processing feature (when used in High Quality mode) makes even the grainy videos look very acceptable to watch.
 
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