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macronerd

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 8, 2007
22
0
Hey yall... Just got a 15" MBP and everything is great except for Flash video. Any type of Flash video, such as Youtube videos, looks grainy and pixelated, especially when there are dark backgrounds. The screen does not look grainy, only the videos. I played the same video next to a Dell Latitude D630 and there was a big difference in smoothness. Any ideas?
 
Hey yall... Just got a 15" MBP and everything is great except for Flash video. Any type of Flash video, such as Youtube videos, looks grainy and pixelated, especially when there are dark backgrounds. The screen does not look grainy, only the videos. I played the same video next to a Dell Latitude D630 and there was a big difference in smoothness. Any ideas?

Well, that is how a lot of the flash video looks, its compressed a whole lot. I do not see anything wrong here...
 
Well, that is how a lot of the flash video looks, its compressed a whole lot. I do not see anything wrong here...

I understand that alot of flash video looks this way. What has me scratching my head is that the same video looks perfect on the Dell laptop. Makes me wonder if something's wrong with the MBP.
 
If you use the default Color LCD profile, it has gamma 1.8 which makes dark colors "lighter" so you can see compressing artifacts better in videos than on Windows PCs that have the default gamma 2.2, darker rendering. On the other hand it's quite possible the the Flash plugin is worse on OS X than on Windows (definitely slower).
 
Sorry for bumping such an old thread, but I'm having the same exact problem when viewing videos, they're very grainy and pixelated, even when i run a game the intro is a bit pixelated.

I just want to know if this is suppose to be normal on Leopard?
 
I just wanna clarify that it's heavily pixelated for me on when dark colors are shown not just in flash video but also in regular ones and in games, pretty much everywhere that involves video playback.

Could it be a video card problem?
 
If your games aren't running in the maximum resolution or the cinematics aren't tailored for 1440x900, etc. then it will look grainy/pixelated/blurry because it has to be upscaled.
 
If your games aren't running in the maximum resolution or the cinematics aren't tailored for 1440x900, etc. then it will look grainy/pixelated/blurry because it has to be upscaled.


I see, I tried to lower the res to like 1024 x 768 and everything was still pixelated.

Is there any way to remedy this?
 
It can't be helped. To get the clearest picture it has to run at 1440x900, at the maximum resolution or higher. 1024x768 is not maximum. Anything lower than 1440x900 will be blurry. Its the nature of LCD monitors.
 
maybe it's just that flash is not very good on os x? we use emacs at school and we always go on youtube (hehe) and the flash quality is pretty bad sometimes and is really blocky. some videos however are very clear so i don't know.
 
maybe it's just that flash is not very good on os x? we use emacs at school and we always go on youtube (hehe) and the flash quality is pretty bad sometimes and is really blocky. some videos however are very clear so i don't know.

I did say that it wasn't just flash but in any video playback i try to watch.

How do you users deal with the pixelated quality?
 
I'm sorry for bumping an old thread , but I'd be interested in finding out more. I just returned my Macbook Pro due to this issue.

I was playing all sorts of compressed video; avi/xvid, mkv, etc. I tried multiple players - vlc, QT, divx. The problem persisted across the board, on all players, on both low and very high bitrate files.

Here's the clincher; these videos look fine on my inferior-spec pc. All of them. I was playing the same videos. Clips that I know well. I was using the same external monitor for both my pc and my mac.

I am certain that the problem occurred on the Macbook itself, but it is more subtle because the screen is much smaller. However, I watch most of my shows on the larger external display.

So, any solutions? I really want to like the Mac. But until I can get this resolved I can never go back...
 
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