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orbitalpunk

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 14, 2006
564
349
I am trying to play 4k h265 MKV files on a nMP 2013 and they all stutter. In VLC, MplayerX and IINA. Has anyone else run into this issue and found a work around? I tried playing the file on the built in SSD and 8TB hard drive.
 

orph

macrumors 68000
Dec 12, 2005
1,884
393
UK
transcode the video, h265 is a hard codec to decode and only new cpu's are accelerated for it.

iv played some h265 video 1080p on my cmp but not tried 4K do you have a sample you can link to? it may help.

use handbrake or something to trans code
 

h9826790

macrumors P6
Apr 3, 2014
16,650
8,574
Hong Kong
What's the bitrate? 4K H265 play quite well on my cMP (config as per my signature). The nMP should able to do it better.
 

orbitalpunk

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 14, 2006
564
349
My files range from 35Mbps to 60Mbps. I think its my CPU because playing 1080p uses about 130% usage, where these 4k h265 files use about 700% on a QuadCore. The GPU is not doing the work, the CPU is. Whats is your CPU usage like? That might explain it.
 

h9826790

macrumors P6
Apr 3, 2014
16,650
8,574
Hong Kong
My files range from 35Mbps to 60Mbps. I think its my CPU because playing 1080p uses about 130% usage, where these 4k h265 files use about 700% on a QuadCore. The GPU is not doing the work, the CPU is. Whats is your CPU usage like? That might explain it.

I just made a quick test on 4K H265 60Mbps play back on my cMP with IINA (this is the best 4K H265 player on my machine so far, but for some videos, MplayerX do better job). 1st few seconds choppy most likely I am encoding video as well. But once I pause the encoding, wait few seconds to let everything settle down. IINA can gives me smooth playback.

Anyway, this is the CPU usage. I played it for few minutes, the whole CPU history graph is valid for this test. The reading vary between 600-1000%.
Screen Shot 2017-02-22 at 22.27.09.jpg
Screen Shot 2017-02-22 at 22.27.12.jpg


P.S. the video is just stored on a traditional HDD.
 
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h9826790

macrumors P6
Apr 3, 2014
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It's possible that you are CPU limiting. However, 1000% on W3690 is roughly equals to 800% on E5-1620. So, I think your nMP should able to do that.

Apart from bitrate, H265 encoder / compression parameters can also make the difference. If the video is created by yourself, you may try another encoder / parameter.

In fact, I find that 1 pass VBR 12Mbps good preset (medium setting) in Adobe ME is very good in general. Anything above that is just wasting of space to storage / time to encode. My eye simply can't tell the difference, not even on my 84" 4K TV. With this setting, IINA only need ~300% to decode, and always gives me smooth playback.
 
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cpnotebook80

macrumors 65816
Feb 4, 2007
1,221
540
Toronto
It's possible that you are CPU limiting. However, 1000% on W3690 is roughly equals to 800% on E5-1620. So, I think your nMP should able to do that.

Apart from bitrate, H265 encoder / compression parameters can also make the difference. If the video is created by yourself, you may try another encoder / parameter.

In fact, I find that 1 pass VBR 12Mbps good preset (medium setting) in Adobe ME is very good in general. Anything above that is just wasting of space to storage / time to encode. My eye simply can't tell the difference, not even on my 84" 4K TV. With this setting, IINA only need ~300% to decode, and always gives me smooth playback.


I have a 12 core 2.93ghz cpu on my 5,1. I wanted to test my 4k playback from this site and realized how slow some clips are. My screen is just the Mac 27" cinema display.

http://jell.yfish.us/

What bitrate sample should I be looking at in the 4k medium?. not sure difference in codecs below from the above site.

Show Only H.264 | Show Only HEVC | Show Only 10-Bit
 

h9826790

macrumors P6
Apr 3, 2014
16,650
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Hong Kong
IMO, for medium quality, 8Mbps is a very good figure for 4K H265. You may able to see the difference if compare to the 12Mbps video. However, the difference is very minor.

In H264, 1080P, 20Mbps can already consider lossless. For UHD, there are 4x 1080P's pixel, so we can consider 80Mbps is lossless. Since H265 has ~2x efficiency of H264, therefore 40Mbps is already the gold standard.

In my own test, 25% of that gold standard is good enough in general and may only shows little bit degrade (for normal watching, but not intentionally pause the video and look close with a magnifying glass). Therefore, for UHD, H265, 10Mbps (target) is a very good balance between quality, playback hardware requirement, bandwidth requirement (for streaming). I encode all my video with this target and further set the max bitrate at 12Mbps to ensure smooth streaming. And I found that the encoder actually keep the video bitrate between 11-12Mbps regardless my target 10Mbps setting. Since most of my good video products end up are very close to 12Mbps, that's why I said 12Mbps is a good bitrate for 4K H265.

In fact, I tried lots of difference setting, on the bitrate test, I tried 8Mbps - 20Mbps (1Mbps interval). Result shows that anything above 12Mbps is basically waste of storage. Very small scale double blind tests shows that no one can tell the difference 99% of the time (except in some very complex fast moving scene).

On the other hand, once down to 8Mbps, I can start to tell the difference on some clips. Therefore, in my personal opinion. I will consider 8Mbps is the medium standard.

Anyway, it's just my personal sharing. You may able to see the difference all the way up to 100Mbps if you have excellent vision, or if you are very very care about details in the video. May be my personal gold standard is just your low standard.
 
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Filin

macrumors regular
Mar 7, 2010
136
37
Ukraine
Lets make some tests :)



Sample 1:

HQ Quality Sample - Ultra HD (3,840 x 2,160), 30p, HQ Quality

MP4, 182.6MB

http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/samsung-nx1/FULLRES/yvid_SAM_0231-HQQuality.MP4

Bitrate ~40Mbps



Sample 2:

Pro Quality Sample - Ultra HD (3,840 x 2,160), 30p, Pro Quality

MP4, 340.2MB

http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/samsung-nx1/FULLRES/yvid_SAM_0230-ProQuality.MP4

Bitrate ~80Mbps


I can easily play first sample with IINA player. But second sample playing with frame rate about 15fps

What you guys have?
 

Synchro3

macrumors 68000
Jan 12, 2014
1,987
850
By the way, Maxwell card with GM 206 (GTX 950, GTX 960) can decode H.265 10 bit and VP9 8 bit:
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=https://www.computerbase.de/2017-02/geforce-378.66-h.265-vp9-12-bit/
[doublepost=1487978548][/doublepost]
Lets make some tests :)



Sample 1:

HQ Quality Sample - Ultra HD (3,840 x 2,160), 30p, HQ Quality

MP4, 182.6MB

http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/samsung-nx1/FULLRES/yvid_SAM_0231-HQQuality.MP4

Bitrate ~40Mbps



Sample 2:

Pro Quality Sample - Ultra HD (3,840 x 2,160), 30p, Pro Quality

MP4, 340.2MB

http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/samsung-nx1/FULLRES/yvid_SAM_0230-ProQuality.MP4

Bitrate ~80Mbps


I can easily play first sample with IINA player. But second sample playing with frame rate about 15fps

What you guys have?

Same here, first sample plays fine, second stutters.
 
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h9826790

macrumors P6
Apr 3, 2014
16,650
8,574
Hong Kong
Lets make some tests :)



Sample 1:

HQ Quality Sample - Ultra HD (3,840 x 2,160), 30p, HQ Quality

MP4, 182.6MB

http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/samsung-nx1/FULLRES/yvid_SAM_0231-HQQuality.MP4

Bitrate ~40Mbps



Sample 2:

Pro Quality Sample - Ultra HD (3,840 x 2,160), 30p, Pro Quality

MP4, 340.2MB

http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/samsung-nx1/FULLRES/yvid_SAM_0230-ProQuality.MP4

Bitrate ~80Mbps


I can easily play first sample with IINA player. But second sample playing with frame rate about 15fps

What you guys have?

HQ Sample plays at 30FPS.

Pro sample basically play at ~12 FPS. Occasionally drop to 10, and only able to achieve smooth playback at the very beginning and at the end.
 

orph

macrumors 68000
Dec 12, 2005
1,884
393
UK
is there a way to show frame rate playback in IINA?
play back of the HQ video is jerky on my 3.33ghz cpu 70-77% cpu use, dont think my gpu is doing much gtx770.
OSX10.10 (so may be better on new versions of osx)
(yvid_SAM_0230-ProQuality was the video)
 

h9826790

macrumors P6
Apr 3, 2014
16,650
8,574
Hong Kong
What is the bottleneck in playing the yvid_SAM_0230-ProQuality.MP4 video?

No idea, MPlayerX do much better job for this particular video, ~22-25FPS, but still not 30.

CPU usage was about 900% in IINA, and only about 500% in MplayerX. RAM is not limiting, SSD / HDD speed is also not limiting. So, the biggest suspect will be the CPU speed. My understanding is that even though the player is multi thread, CPU speed can still cause the shuttering.
 
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pastrychef

macrumors 601
Sep 15, 2006
4,753
1,450
New York City, NY
I just tested it with IINA and was able to get 30fps on my hackintosh with i7 6700K clocked at 4.8GHz. CPU usage was ranging between 300-500%, mostly around 400%, from 8 threads. I suspect that per core GHz is the determining factor in getting this video to play smoothly.

On the jelly fish videos, I am able to play all the H.264 encoded videos smoothly. The 10-Bit HD stuff also played smoothly. On the 120Mbps 10-Bit 4K video, the first half was around 14-17fps but second half played smoothly.
 
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Maxwill

macrumors member
May 25, 2015
52
20
Following is quick rundown of well-known hardware that includes dedicated HEVC decoding blocks, which definitely support efficient HEVC playback:

  • Intel 6th-generation ‘Skylake’ Core processors or newer
  • AMD 6th-generation ‘Carizzo’ APUs or newer
  • AMD ‘Fiji’ GPUs (Radeon R9 Fury/Fury X/Nano) or newer
  • Nvidia GM206 GPUs (GeForce GTX 960/950) or newer
  • Other Nvidia GeForce GTX 900 series GPUs have partial HEVC hardware decoding support
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon 805/615/410/208 SoCs or newer. Support ranges from 720p decoding on low-end parts to 4K playback on high-end parts.
  • Nvidia Tegra X1 SoCs or newer
  • Samsung Exynos 5 Octa 5430 SoCs or newer
  • Apple A8 SoCs or newer
  • Some MediaTek SoCs from mid-2014 onwards
 
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