I've got a 1080p mkv, can I take advantage of h.264 in my unibody macbook?

[olivelawn]

I've got a 1080p mkv, can I take advantage of h.264 in my unibody macbook?

Let me start by saying i'm not an expert in codecs, containers, video or audio in general.

I have a 4GB, 2.4 Intel Core Duo, unibody macbook with NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (rumored to have h.264 hardware acceleration), and running 10.5.6.

A pal of mine gave me a 4.3GB 1080p mkv file and it was basically unwatchable in vlc. The image pixelated and skipped frames. cpu pegged at 95-110%.

I installed perian and it was watchable via quicktime, but movie inspector still showed that it was still skipping frames. I was playing an average of 14FPS (out of 24FPS) and the cpu was once again pegged at 95-110%.

I went to apple's quicktime site, watched one of their 1080p mov trailer files, and movie inspector showed I was playing 24FPS out of 24FPS and cpu was about 30%. This is great. I suspect the CPU is offloading cycles to the GeForce 9400M.

Attatched are some screenshots of movie inspector--one with the mkv file running and the other with the mov apple trailer. My question is, can I somehow get my mkv movie (perhaps by transcoding into a different format?) to remain 1080p, not skip frames, and hopefully take advantage of the GeForce 9400M?

 

[Eidorian]

We never really resolved if h.264 in an MKV container would benefit from the GPU decoding acceleration but we always leaned toward no.

 

[grue]

 

[nightfly13]

Yeah it's the wrong forum, but the answer is, with the right program, you can play 'em. It won't use GPU, but a multi-core aware app like PLEX will play it ok.

 

[tonyeck]

Enter snarky mode:

What you need to do is buy a blu-ray player, a nice HDTV, and buy Planet Earth blu ray, and watch it that way, instead of "acquiring" it through a friend



Leaving snarky mode