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Prices for dedicated HEVC hardware will drop. The codec is pretty much intended for 1080p and 4K video on demand over existing communications infrastructure. Cast your mind back 10 years and most PCs couldn't software decode 1080p video well, now it's £20 for a Fire Stick...

True. Just surprised that the 3.3 GHz i3 was struggling
 
My Early 2005 1.67GHz PowerBook with coreplayer can play any 720p file I throw at it, and can even chug through 1080 in maybe 10-12FPS (Not watchable, but it can do it) and on top of that it has a hard drive thats going to fail any minute. Maybe try reinstalling OS X? My G5 after reinstalling OS X can now play 720p and 1080p very smoothly with a solid 30 frames in both VLC and Core.

It is a fresh install of OS X Leo. I did have Tiger on here first, but notices about the same performance. I think it really is just the type of file. I get good playback from 720p files that I get from YouTube, but not many of my 720p or 1080p videos play too well. (downloaded from the usual places).

I cam calling it a compromise, as I am lucky it plays anything in HD. Plus, I just got a free PowerMac G5 dual 2GHz (PCI) today! And it plays 720p juuuust fine ;)
 
Just for the hell of it, I thought I'd try a few HD videos on an eMac I've recently refurbished, so loaded in CorePlayer.
It played that <jellyfish-3-mbps-hd-h264.mkv> 1080p file, but obviously wasn't happy with it.
Then tried a YT downloaded 720p file, and although watchable, the lip-sync was way off.
The eMac is a 700MHz with 384Mb RAM, so I then upped the memory to max (1GB).
Same results as before, so I guess that would tend to confirm that the Nvidia GeForce2 MXvideo card is not up to the task.
Whether the later eMac models with ATI Radeon 7500 / 9200 / 9600 cards would fare better I'm unable to say.
 
That is what I would expect of that machine. The 1.42GHz model with better GPU would likely fare much better in the HD game.
 
Once you've got a Core Image supported GPU, there's little performance increase for video playback with faster GPUs on PowerPC Macs.

H.264 GPU accelerated decode requires OS X 10.6.3 on late-2008 onwards Intel Macs.
 
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