2016 m5 macbook able to play 4k 60fps youtube?

[Eggtastic]

This will sound stupid but here it goes... As the title states I am wondering if anyone is having trouble playing 4k 60 fps youtube on chrome. It stutters a lot and it gets very hot. Probably normal for a light task machine I assume.

Anyway I've always just played youtube in 1080p and was fine with it. Reason for asking this today and not when I bought this machine was I was trying to watch the new Halo infinite gameplay trailer (I know the reveal has people questioning the graphics as I felt the same from the live stream). So to investigate further I tried to do what I mentioned above and ran into problems...

So, am I stuck with choppy 4k 60fps with the limits of my machine or is there another way to go about this?

 

[casperes1996]

I mean; You can always download the video and watch it offline. That's a good bit less taxing, especially if you use a codec that's hardware accelerated on the device.
youtube-dl can download YouTube videos (command line program)

 

[Mike Boreham]

This will sound stupid but here it goes... As the title states I am wondering if anyone is having trouble playing 4k 60 fps youtube on chrome. It stutters a lot and it gets very hot. Probably normal for a light task machine I assume.

Anyway I've always just played youtube in 1080p and was fine with it. Reason for asking this today and not when I bought this machine was I was trying to watch the new Halo infinite gameplay trailer (I know the reveal has people questioning the graphics as I felt the same from the live stream). So to investigate further I tried to do what I mentioned above and ran into problems...

So, am I stuck with choppy 4k 60fps with the limits of my machine or is there another way to go about this?

Anything useful in this thread?

 

[now i see it]

I have one of those MacBooks too. The 2016 retina MacBook doesn't have a 4K resolution screen. It's native resolution is 2304X1440. A 4K video won't look any better than a 1080p video.
And as for 4K,60P? Forget it. The little integrated GPU will choke on that. It can't play it smooth.

 

[Eggtastic]

Thanks for the replies. I could download it but I dont want to go to the trouble of installing an app or buying into youtube. I just wanted to run at 4k 60fps through chrome.

 

[bizthewiz]

This will sound stupid but here it goes... As the title states I am wondering if anyone is having trouble playing 4k 60 fps youtube on chrome. It stutters a lot and it gets very hot. Probably normal for a light task machine I assume.

Anyway I've always just played youtube in 1080p and was fine with it. Reason for asking this today and not when I bought this machine was I was trying to watch the new Halo infinite gameplay trailer (I know the reveal has people questioning the graphics as I felt the same from the live stream). So to investigate further I tried to do what I mentioned above and ran into problems...

So, am I stuck with choppy 4k 60fps with the limits of my machine or is there another way to go about this?

I have the same issue. I encounter it with 1080p 60fps on Chrome but on Safari it runs fine. However Safari does not support 4k.

-- edit --

Safari does not play 4K Videos. My problems seems to be related to 60fps playback

 

[yurc]

I have one of those MacBooks too. The 2016 retina MacBook doesn't have a 4K resolution screen. It's native resolution is 2304X1440. A 4K video won't look any better than a 1080p video.
And as for 4K,60P? Forget it. The little integrated GPU will choke on that. It can't play it smooth.

I am second this.

I still doesn’t understand merit of playing 4K videos on non 4K screen resolution other than torturing incapable hardware. Even I had 4K monitor connected to my workstation, I still pretty hard discerning 1080p and 4K while playing fullscreen after a watching a while.

Nice quality encoded 1080p videos would suffice for majority laptop and it best balance between quality and hardware processing capability. Honestly,4K contents is overrated unless watched with up to 40" flat panels.

 

[Mike Boreham]

I have a 2017 12" Macbook i5 16GB. On chrome, playing a 4K 60FPS video on youtube, the whole laptop stutters like hell just like you describe. Temps were going through the roof, and I couldn't figure out why. I tried everything, close all tabs and only playing it one ONE tab, clearing cache and cookies, reinstalling chrome etc nothing helped.

Then I played the exact same 4K 60fps video on Safari and wow. It was buttery smooth, not a stutter or anything. Opened multiple tabs, with other 4k 60fps vids and the same buttery smooth performance continued. Temps stayed normal. Basically, the way you'd expect it to behave.

So to explain why you get the choppy-ness, it's not your laptop, it's chrome.
Maybe try play it on Safari?

I started playing all of my youtube videos in Safari..I soon got used to how good Safari is and ended up Switching to it permanently!

My understanding is that Safari does not support 4k yet, so you are seeing it at 1080. As above post says, you can't see difference on a 12" screen.

 

[bizthewiz]

My understanding is that Safari does not support 4k yet, so you are seeing it at 1080. As above post says, you can't see difference on a 12" screen.

You are correct, Safari does not play back 4K videos.
However, you will see the difference if you played back at a higher resolution such as 1440p or 4k, given that the macbook's resolution is just a touch under 1440p.

 

[EugW]

Just stick with 1440p in Safari. It's h.264 in Safari, and your MacBook won't break a sweat. It also saves battery.

EDIT:

Hmm... For some reason, I'm stuck at 1080p60 in both Safari and Chrome on my Core m3 2017 MacBook. Can't even get 1440p for some reason.

OP, do you have a link to the specific trailer?

I have one of those MacBooks too. The 2016 retina MacBook doesn't have a 4K resolution screen. It's native resolution is 2304X1440. A 4K video won't look any better than a 1080p video.
And as for 4K,60P? Forget it. The little integrated GPU will choke on that. It can't play it smooth.

Playback is CPU, not GPU. Apple doesn't support VP9 hardware decode on Macs. Strangely enough though, Apple supports it now on iOS and iPadOS.

 

[EugW]

Just stick with 1440p in Safari. It's h.264 in Safari, and your MacBook won't break a sweat. It also saves battery.

EDIT:

Hmm... For some reason, I'm stuck at 1080p60 in both Safari and Chrome on my Core m3 2017 MacBook. Can't even get 1440p for some reason.

OP, do you have a link to the specific trailer?


Playback is CPU, not GPU. Apple doesn't support VP9 hardware decode on Macs. Strangely enough though, Apple supports it now on iOS and iPadOS.

Well, that's interesting. Apparently, YouTube no longer supports 1440p in Safari. It is now limited to 1080p.

I just Googled Halo Infinite 4K and tried playing that on my iMac 5K 2017. It plays in 4K just fine in Chrome, but when I switch to Safari, it drops down to 1080p. In the past with other videos I would have gotten 1440p.

However, when I tried playing the same trailer on my MacBook (on the built-in screen), it was limited to 1080p in Chrome too. Strange. OP, how are you getting the 4K stream on your MacBook? What OS, and is it on the built-in screen? I'm on Catalina.

 

[mj_]

While I was able to play the Halo Infinite trailer in 2160p@60 on my 2017 m3 MacBook using Microsoft Edge it was anything but smooth. In fact it was horrible. It ran perfectly fine in 1080p@60 and 1440p@60 though.