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Playing 4K You Tube Videos

C

ct1211

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 3, 2012
321
51
Michigan
This past weekend I had tried playing some of the 4K videos on You Tube that are popping up. The Verge mentioned these videos would lay most Laptops to waste and they were right as my Late 2013 base 13" rMBP basically just froze up when I attempted to play them.

However last night I was able to actually play these videos on my new 2015 rMBP which is rather maxed with i7 16GB Ram and a 512GB HD. Curiously they had a fair amount of stutter using Chrome browser but were virtually glitch free if played in Safari. I'm amazed they played at all though.
 
ct1211 said:
The Verge mentioned these videos would lay most Laptops to waste and they were right as my Late 2013 base 13" rMBP basically just froze up when I attempted to play them.
Click to expand...

- That shouldn't happen. Any newer Mac should play 4K with ease.
My older 2011 model has no issues.

Do you have a link to the article you mention?
 
Is the glitching happening due to your internet speeds? What's your bandwidth?
 
I have no problems playing 4K YouTube videos with my early 2011 cMBP.
 
ct1211 said:
This past weekend I had tried playing some of the 4K videos on You Tube that are popping up. The Verge mentioned these videos would lay most Laptops to waste and they were right as my Late 2013 base 13" rMBP basically just froze up when I attempted to play them.

However last night I was able to actually play these videos on my new 2015 rMBP which is rather maxed with i7 16GB Ram and a 512GB HD. Curiously they had a fair amount of stutter using Chrome browser but were virtually glitch free if played in Safari. I'm amazed they played at all though.
Click to expand...

Quit using Chrome, it's a massive resource hog.

Even my early-2011 15" cMBP plays it fine.

In fact, all my Macs play 4K fine.
 
ct1211 said:
This past weekend I had tried playing some of the 4K videos on You Tube that are popping up. The Verge mentioned these videos would lay most Laptops to waste and they were right as my Late 2013 base 13" rMBP basically just froze up when I attempted to play them.

However last night I was able to actually play these videos on my new 2015 rMBP which is rather maxed with i7 16GB Ram and a 512GB HD. Curiously they had a fair amount of stutter using Chrome browser but were virtually glitch free if played in Safari. I'm amazed they played at all though.
Click to expand...

WASTEEED lol late 2013 2.6/8/256 here

It just kept buffering.
 
My thoughts and experience on this: My new 13" 2015 rMBP can play the 4K videos with no problems....with safari. Not chrome. Chrome gets laggy and choppy. In safari, the same video is smooth as glass. Second point is internet connection. Even at home on my 105mbps comcast connection, I get a lot of buffering. But at work connected to AC wireless @ 1.3gbps running over a 2 gig wan pipe, the 4K videos stream like butter. Perfect. So you need the right browser and you need a big internet connection.
 
Using a classic Macbook Pro 2012 and can playback 4K in either Chrome or Safari with little issue.

Maintaining a decent enough download speed from my router is more of an issue in streaming 4k for me.
 
i meant to post last night, but i scanned through youtube last night watching 4k videos, watched all of them smoothly. i have the new rMBP.

i honestly didnt understand the hype for 4k until last night. :eek:
 
happyhippo1337 said:
The videos they were talking about are 4k 60FPS.

And you won't be able to play them on your MacBook.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately to test 4K @ 60FPS on Youtube at this time you need to use Chrome.

With Chrome my Late 2013 MBP was able to play 4K @ 60FPS smoothly, but only when using the Discrete GPU. When using Iris Pro the watching experience was notably less smooth. Hopefully when this resolution&fps combination becomes more common you will be able to use it also with Safari (without installing flash).
 
A couple things here:

This is a 4K 60fps video, not just a regular 4K (30fps) video, so it needs roughly twice the performance to play.

YouTube uses software decoding which is very CPU-heavy. The same video played in say QuickTime would be GPU-accelerated and would be a lot easier on your machine.

You don't need super-beefy hardware for 4K playback when you have proper hardware acceleration. In fact the A8 chip inside the iPhone 6 is powerful enough for 4K playback. I wouldn't be surprised to see a revamped Apple TV with an A8 chip with 4K video support.
 
Apple is smart and they use their GPU to decode the VP9 codec that Youtube uses to play video. Now, since Chrome and Safari use the same rendering engine this should be no surprise that Chrome plays UHD30FPS just fine on even older Core 2 Duos with AT least an Intel HD (1st Gen) in windows..Chrome sucks on Mac and doesn't follows Safaris integration with GPU acceleration all that well. Any recent Macbook that can run Lion, can play UHD 30FPS youtube videos in Safari. I'm not sure where that review got their results but they clearly did it wrong ;)

now.. 60FPS, with an overclocked 3840QM (3770k Stock Performance) uses 80% CPU to decode UHD60FPS in Youtube on Chrome with no dropped frames and uses 35% of the video decoding engine built into nvidia chips so this may throttle some Intel + nVidia Macbooks over time and may lag. The Intel Iris should have NO issue at all with this playback if Apple implemented GPU acceleration properly. (i don't have an iris model macbook to test)
 
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