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For Penryn MBP owners: How do you see this video?

I would dare to say that it depends on the uptime: in enough time the single op messing up everything takes place. Unfortunately the current Mac OS release is not as stable as other Unix variants. I have been trying to point out the single operation causing such graphics weirdness for a long time, but I can't. Unfortunately neither can Apple developers.

I bought this machine when 10.5.2 was out and in two releases plus one graphics update the situation has only slightly improved. Sometimes even 2D OS transitions appear smoother on Macbooks. I have used ATI-based MBPs and they are much better even on basic 2D tasks (expose, spaces).

thistle
 
looks fine to me.

on a side note, I would just like to say I am getting so sick of the Ivory tower and all their egotistical nonsense. I was in the Columbia University bookstore the other day and overheard this old woman introducing herself as doctor, professor, magistrate etc etc bs bs bs... She kept on going but I had to walk away before I vomited. The person only asked for her freakin name! get over yourself people... [rant over]
 
ggjstudios said:
The video, while grainy due to its quality, shows fine on my MBP. The only flashing I see is the intermittent flash of people in the audience taking pictures of the speaker. Surely, that's not what you're referring to. I don't see any other effects that would indicate a problem with the video or the processing of the graphics.
Click to expand...

Try to watch the clip taken by thistle again..

looks like some kind of tetris-ish white blocks to me.. I can be very sure that it is a graphics-related glitch from my experience with a whole gallery of NVIDIA crap..
 
No problems for me. Although on other videos i sometimes (very rarely) get bright green and purple squares for a few seconds, then they play fine.
 
lordthistle said:
I have prepared a video showing what I am speaking about.

Watch what I see.

(It has been accelerated by the youtube processing engine, I recorded it at normal speed).

I hope other Penryn owners will contribute to this post. If it's true that other owners do not have any problem, then it can only be hardware related.

My MBP has already gone twice for repair (screen, dark stripes). Twice they made the "hardware test", with 100% success rate. So should these hraphics performance be considered normal? (And I avoid speaking about the bad sound, the popping, etc).

UPDATE
I made a reboot and the same video is without glitches. 514Mac, can you do the same thing? Reboot and, without doing anything else, watch that video. May be it's caused by the lousy implementation of nVidia specs by Apple.


thistle
Click to expand...

No troubles here. 2.5GHz Penryn MBP 17in...
 
ggjstudios said:
[...]
By the way, it's not a Penryn issue. Penryn is the Intel processor, which is the CPU and is not responsible for video processing. The GPU is the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT, which, as stated before, appears in all MBPs since mid 2007 with both Merom and Penryn processors.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the lesson. But if I asked to Penryn owners, there is a reason.

There are problems in the last update that you would not expect from a simple processor upgrade. For example, dark stripes (heard about them?). There are people, like me, who do not no like the newest model as their work machine and buy a model which is at the end of its production cycle. With the hope of having an old but close-to-perfect product (like for cars).

With this MBP things are so messed up that I cannot understand if the problems are hw or sw. Since a week without MBP represent a cost for me, I'd rather understand if technicians can do something useful.

And technicians are not geniuses as Apple likes to make you believe. Sometimes they're wrong. Sometimes they exchange pieces and you end up with a machine worse than the previous one.

=> Then it's better to restrict the search space (-> Penryn).

Clearer?

thistle
 
ok. I'm in the middle of watching this video. (Good video, btw. People should watch it.)

When I was watching another video on Hulu, my GPU heatsink went up to 69-70c after about half an hour. It was 480p.

After that, I started to get the dark shadows on the screen. I don't know it's related to GPU or LED, but I thought I'd share.

I took some pictures with the digital camera in case it happens again. That way, I can take it to Apple if it reoccurs. It stopped after I put the display to sleep. Although the colors on the screen are looking a little more washed out now than before. (could just be me)
 
Looks exactly the same on both my Penryn MBP (8600 GT 512MB) and white iMac 20" C2D (X1600 128MB), playing the video through both Safari and Firefox. No white blocks here. I highly doubt this is a GPU issue. The video is very low quality and highly compressed to begin with.

However, it's hard to conclude anything because my MBP is already on its second logic board (the first one fried after a lockup while saving a file in Excel - weird, eh?).
 
Surprisingly it I'm not experiencing the white blocks.. have you tried resetting the SMC or the PRAM?
 
Seems to play fine on my latest 2.4 256MB 15"

But on my last replacement MBP (same specs) i had white blocks flashing in images and flash movies and eventually this progressed to the entire screen being corrupted when doing simple tasks like resizing a window.

Next time you see the white blocks, try opening up itunes and iphoto and quickly resizing windows a bunch of times - it could reveal a more serious issue.
 
For those asking because they missed a message: a reboot is enough to see everything correctly.

- thistle
 
ryanrul said:
[...]
Next time you see the white blocks, try opening up itunes and iphoto and quickly resizing windows a bunch of times - it could reveal a more serious issue.
Click to expand...

I had the flashing video problem again (less than 24 hours, but I slept this machine quite a bunch of times) and spent the last two minutes resizing and moving the two applications you told me to. Nothing happened.

What problem did you expect I would experience?

thistle
 
ryanrul said:
Seems to play fine on my latest 2.4 256MB 15"

But on my last replacement MBP (same specs) i had white blocks flashing in images and flash movies and eventually this progressed to the entire screen being corrupted when doing simple tasks like resizing a window.

Next time you see the white blocks, try opening up itunes and iphoto and quickly resizing windows a bunch of times - it could reveal a more serious issue.
Click to expand...

I have managed to replicate the problem using that technique on both my first MBP and the first logic board replacement..

lordthistle said:
I had the flashing video problem again (less than 24 hours, but I slept this machine quite a bunch of times) and spent the last two minutes resizing and moving the two applications you told me to. Nothing happened.

What problem did you expect I would experience?

thistle
Click to expand...

Just have a look at my flickr gallery.. the first few photos where there are a few overlapping windows.
 
Seemed to play fine for me...

I don't know if this is related but I can tell you this. If I connect a secondary monitor to my MBP via DVI, all video will be choopy until I restart the application. You can give this a try. Load up a 1080p vid from apples quick time HD site without having a monitor plugged in (should be on fresh reboot to show you that the second monitor is the cause). Your vid should play smooth. Now add a secondary monitor and watch the vid get all choppy. You can stop the vid or try and load another vid and it will all be choppy until I quit quick time and start over.

So, for the guys with odd video, try restarting the application that is playing the vid and see if that does not help.

-Zeek
 
lordthistle said:
Yes, I agree. Great lesson.

Could you please post the link to the video on Hulu?

thistle
Click to expand...

I wasn't watching "The Last Lecture" on hulu. I actually looked it up on youtube. Here is the link.


If you look at that link under views, you will see a choice to make it in higher quality. Give that a shot.


Some streaming video will be ok to watch, others will be painful. It all depends on your available bandwidth. Most sites will determine how fast your speed is and give you the highest quality your bandwidth will support. But white squares are a whole different story.

Sorry this took so long to reply.
 
This is going to sound kind of newbish :cool: but what is a Penryn? i bought my MBP about a week or so ago.

The video plays fine by the way.
 
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