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MBP TB can't play 4K h.265 files :(

Sovon Halder said:
So RED.


HEVC Remux 4K Planet Earth 2 - IINA.

View attachment 760768 View attachment 760771
Click to expand...
Yes, very, very red.

Have you submitted a bug report?


caramelpolice said:
So, I have a 2016 15" Pro. Some 10-bit HEVC plays okay at lower bitrates, but that 60fps 75mbps 4K HDR Sony camping video brings my poor machine to its knees. Constant stutters in QuickTime.

UNTIL...

I plug in my Radeon RX 580 external GPU. I guess Apple must be using hardware acceleration from the eGPU, because that same video plays back beautifully on an external monitor with an eGPU attached. That makes me feel a lot more at ease about not having the 2017 model, because 10-bit HEVC acceleration is the only substantial upgrade and the eGPU I bought anyway for other reasons fixes it for my 2016 model.
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That's very interesting. Way to rub it in even more, Apple. Works with eGPUs but not with built-in AMD GPUs (except for the iMac Pro).
 
EugW said:
Yes, very, very red.

Have you submitted a bug report?
Click to expand...
What's the point man. I am fairly certain this is going to end up marked as API limitation. I've done this couple of times before. Besides there is this color banding issue, the one thing that kills me every time I watch a 4K high bitrate stream.

I have accepted it :) It's not anywhere anytime soon. Though I'll raise a bug report at IINA's Github repo.

I went a step further last month to see how **** is in Windows side these days. I bought a thumb drive just to install the trial Windows 10 Pro that I downloaded from Microsoft. And my experience was crap. Took me a while to understand that the control panel and customisation panel - these 2 are different. Then there was this scrolling direction limitation etc.

Anyways, the 4K videos played. But colors were desaturated and washed out. Nowhere near IINA or QT in terms of vibrancy and overall quality. IINA over saturates I bit more than QT I know but it was way worse than QT as well.

So then I fired up MPC-HC with madVR but nothing worked up to me satisfaction. 10 hours later formatted the thumb drive and removed the bootcamp partition.
 
It seems to me that right now, while not perfect, QT is the best player on the Mac for this stuff. But QT is very picky about file types.

I am still hopeful that 10.14 will bring 4K 10-bit streaming to the Mac, which will increase interest in 4K on the Mac, and also get the various players' developers to improve playback quality.

BTW, I have a 1080p SDR projector system to which I added a 4K 10-bit UHD Blu-ray player. It was a significant problem since everything looked washed out on players that didn't do any real HDR to SDR conversion, whereas some players which attempted to compensate caused banding or incorrect colours when doing the 4K HDR to 1080p SDR conversion.

Finally I bought a Panasonic which actually does it right (relatively) and even has a conversion slider that allows you to adjust this on a sliding scale. There's no significant banding, and the default colour saturation is good, but you can adjust colour saturation for HDR to SDR conversion to your own preference in the settings too.

So it seems these issues are pretty hard to deal with since brands such as Sony and Philips (the two of which invented the CD) and Samsung and LG and Oppo (a boutique Chinese brand) etc. all had problems with this, at least initially.

Why did I want this on my 1080p system? Because some companies only put the best Atmos soundtracks on the 4K discs. My audio system for the 1080p projector is a 5.1.2 Dolby Atmos setup. Plus I didn't want to rebuy discs down the line, esp. since the 4K UHD disc packages include a 1080p copy anyway.
 
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EugW said:
It seems to me that right now, while not perfect, QT is the best player on the Mac for this stuff. But QT is very picky about file types.
Click to expand...
QT is my favourite too. It's got great colors, insanely efficient and a sold player that never crashes or has weird bugs that third party players have. BUT it the reason why I can't use it very often is it doesn't support mkv and no srt subtitle. Damn. So much restriction and limitation everywhere! frustrating!
 
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Quick update:

For the first time in the past year (since I started using mac for multimedia), I'm finally impressed with VLC.

I raised an issue earlier in the evening regarding the saturation problem I mentioned earlier today. https://github.com/lhc70000/iina/issues/1673

One of the contributors pointed me towards a duplicate issue and I read stuff in there. Turns out for this movie, VLC is hands down handling it the best. Visit the link, see for yourself, I've posted multiple screenshots for IINA, MPV & VLC.

Not so useless after all, huh!
 
Ok, I have a 2017 15" Touch Bar MBP with 3.1 GHz Kaby Lake, basically maxed out specs. I can't believe Apple doesn't support its own laptop's CPU OR GPU hardware acceleration capabilities in its software! Embarrassing that we have to resort to Windows in order to do this!

After trying everything out in macOS including VLC and IINA and MPV, noting the same things noted before about something being wrong with all of them, I finally found a way to acceptably play back 4K HDR10 HEVC (H.265) content.

Install Windows 10 on Boot Camp, and play it back in MPC-HC. It's PERFECT! (And no, I didn't need to install any 'HEVC Video Extensions' thing in the Microsoft Store. Just install Windows.)

It has only 2-3% CPU usage, PROPER color (neither over-bright like IINA nor over-dark like VLC), no color banding, and most elusively, BUTTER smooth playback! FINALLY I can enjoy super HQ content and not get distracted by playback issues, and just get lost in the content! Hint: Blue Planet II.

PowerDVD (latest version) seemed to be almost as good as MPC-HC as well. I think I noticed a glitch, but probably a performance spasm due to the fact that it's ****** overshiny bloatware, but CPU usage is same low and it basically looks the same as MPC-HC color-wise.

Sovon Halder, I'd like you to try out Windows Boot Camp and MPC-HC, and see if you have the same findings.

Glad I found something that makes use of the beautiful retina screen and expensive hardware! Granted it's not a full 4K screen, but it's kinda 3/4 (above 1080p) and 10-bit color, so I sure want to enjoy it.
 
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mindfulmac said:
Ok, I have a 2017 15" Touch Bar MBP with 3.1 GHz Kaby Lake, basically maxed out specs. I can't believe Apple doesn't support its own laptop's CPU OR GPU hardware acceleration capabilities in its software! Embarrassing that we have to resort to Windows in order to do this!

After trying everything out in macOS including VLC and IINA and MPV, noting the same things noted before about something being wrong with all of them, I finally found a way to acceptably play back 4K HDR10 HEVC (H.265) content.

Install Windows 10 on Boot Camp, and play it back in MPC-HC. It's PERFECT! (And no, I didn't need to install any 'HEVC Video Extensions' thing in the Microsoft Store. Just install Windows.)

It has only 2-3% CPU usage, PROPER color (neither over-bright like IINA nor over-dark like VLC), no color banding, and most elusively, BUTTER smooth playback! FINALLY I can enjoy super HQ content and not get distracted by playback issues, and just get lost in the content! Hint: Blue Planet II.

PowerDVD (latest version) seemed to be almost as good as MPC-HC as well. I think I noticed a glitch, but probably a performance spasm due to the fact that it's ****** overshiny bloatware, but CPU usage is same low and it basically looks the same as MPC-HC color-wise.

Sovon Halder, I'd like you to try out Windows Boot Camp and MPC-HC, and see if you have the same findings.

Glad I found something that makes use of the beautiful retina screen and expensive hardware! Granted it's not a full 4K screen, but it's kinda 3/4 (above 1080p) and 10-bit color, so I sure want to enjoy it.
Click to expand...


What's the problem with the Kaby Lake TBMPs playing H.265 4K content with HDR10?
 
Aquamite said:
What very specific way?
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I'm not quite sure the full extent of what encoding settings your file has to have, but it's not just 'hvc1' vs. 'hevc' (I tried that) - it seems to be quite a few things in how you encode your HEVC file, and that sucks. Windows seems to have a nice broadly working API / driver situation so that you can throw any type of 4K HDR HDR10 HEVC file at it, but not macOS.
 
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