1080p Video

[SaSaSushi]

I'm trying to watch 1080p videos such as this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N06dOIG3OZg&feature=related

But, it's all choppy and not even playing correctly.
I'm using the latest firefox.

If I let the entire video buffer on your example clip above it runs smoothly on my i7 iMac at fullscreen 1080p. I'm also using Firefox 3.6.3 (on SL 10.6.3).

 

[ARF900]

You realize that the screen on that macbook will not show you 1080p? The screen isnt even good enough, im not sure why you need to watch a youtube video of about 360p unless your in fullscreen and even there 480 should be good enough.

 

[maczach16]

You realize that the screen on that macbook will not show you 1080p? The screen isnt even good enough, im not sure why you need to watch a youtube video of about 360p unless your in fullscreen and even there 480 should be good enough.

The quality of 360p vs 720p is noticeable to me even in Youtube's small video player size.

 

[Makosuke]

Well, no this happens with just 1 tab open. And when playing just a 720p video, Firefox pushes 160% cpu (1.6 cores out of 2), so Flash must be able to multithread.

Interesting. I stand corrected, though I'm now curious how it divides up tasks in video decoding.

I did a bit of experimentation on my MBP (2.16 Core Duo, so pretty old) at home, and found that on your video 720p resulted in Safari using about 160% CPU and it playing more or less smoothly. 1080p had both cores pretty much pegged (and it played very badly).

Not sure why it's not maxing both cores on your computer with 1080p, but regardless it wouldn't likely play properly anyway.

Also, ARF900 is right that with the resolution on your screen 1080p shouldn't make any difference--you have a 1280x800 pixel screen, and widescreen 720p is 1280x720, so apart from the black bars it's exactly the right size for your monitor at fullscreen. It is, however, going to be noticeably better than 480p, particularly with how close you are to the screen.

Now, while the resolution of 1080p does you zilch good, were your computer capable of playing it, in reality the 1080p YouTube video might look a bit better than 720p because the higher bitrate is essentially resulting in less compression artifacts when downscaled to 720p. Even so, it's almost certainly not worth worrying about--just stick to 720p.

 

[maczach16]

Interesting. I stand corrected, though I'm now curious how it divides up tasks in video decoding.

I did a bit of experimentation on my MBP (2.16 Core Duo, so pretty old) at home, and found that on your video 720p resulted in Safari using about 160% CPU and it playing more or less smoothly. 1080p had both cores pretty much pegged (and it played very badly).

Not sure why it's not maxing both cores on your computer with 1080p, but regardless it wouldn't likely play properly anyway.

Also, ARF900 is right that with the resolution on your screen 1080p shouldn't make any difference--you have a 1280x800 pixel screen, and widescreen 720p is 1280x720, so apart from the black bars it's exactly the right size for your monitor at fullscreen. It is, however, going to be noticeably better than 480p, particularly with how close you are to the screen.

Now, while the resolution of 1080p does you zilch good, were your computer capable of playing it, in reality the 1080p YouTube video might look a bit better than 720p because the higher bitrate is essentially resulting in less compression artifacts when downscaled to 720p. Even so, it's almost certainly not worth worrying about--just stick to 720p.

That is probably what I will end up doing (watching in 720p)

Thanks for your help.